For her first solo exhibition in Paris, Cyrielle Gulacsy presents a body of new work in a variety of media: painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. In contrast to her previous exhibition in New York, “Light in the Distance”, which took us to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, “Lumière terrestre” proposes a return to Earth. It’s a landing guided not by the stars, but by living things: one of the most powerful sources of light that the universe has created.
These new works are inspired by the work of astrophysicist David Elbaz, described in the book La plus belle ruse de la lumière.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou.
Exhibition text written by David Elbaz
Astrophysicist
Scientific Director of the Astrophysics Department – CEA Saclay
Managing Editor of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics
Look around you: the shape of trees, leaves and flowers embodies a universal principle that permeates the universe as far as the eye can see. In the beginning, there was nothing living, and yet it was already there. Our telescopes bear witness to this: since the dawn of time, light has been multiplying and matter has been organizing itself. The shapes of the first stars and the nebulae that support them obey the same principle that unfolds the petals of a flower: capturing light and multiplying its grains, the photons.
By chance?
Yes, of course, no two shapes are alike, and it’s thanks to chance that the singularity that creates beauty is born.
A dream?
Of course it is. Isn’t night the dreamer’s refuge?
Night, obscurity, cosmic voids and other dark nebulae hide their game well.
The game of light, which gives them meaning by outlining their contours, taking advantage of their absence to fill the cosmos.
And what about us?
Beings of light?
And why not.
But also the snail, the clover, the oak. And the Earth… And the Sun…
All living things are powerful sources of infrared light. Even the smallest insect, in proportion to its mass, rivals the luminous power of a star. The bee is distinguished from the star not by its wings or its stinger – although it must be said that the star has neither – but because the matter that forms the body of the bee radiates thousands of times more photons than that which inhabits the star.
Time ticks away the grains of light and the world is transformed.
How can we capture the essence of this movement, these invisible yet paradoxically luminous transformations? Perhaps this is what unites and unites Cyrielle Gulacsy’s works.
They all stem from the same intention… To see the invisible.
That’s where we come from. That’s where the particles of light are most numerous, because light exists even when our eyes can’t detect it. Fortunately, otherwise we would be dazzled by our own light…
With them, we can see the invisible, perceive the universal in the singularity of living and terrestrial forms, recognize our cosmic origins, despite our singularities, and rediscover the comfort of finally feeling at home, in the midst of stars and clovers.
When we look at one of Gulacsy’s works, the magic happens, reconciling us with the invisible, revealing the universality of our singularity. Our roots reach deep into the earth and into the heart of the universe. Perhaps because what links us to the work is our fragility, the cracks through which the light passes.
How is it that we’ve always known about it but never thought about it?
Our eyes are capable of detecting a single photon. We are not really aware of it, but the experiment has been done, and the researcher who carried it out himself described the sensation he felt when a photon landed on his retina: a kind of intuition, a form of intimacy with light.
Science conveys a form of beauty, but it takes time and perseverance to break through the thick shell that separates the initiate from the layman. The finesse and precision of Cyrielle Gulacsy’s works open small windows that allow us to see inside, to savor the beauty of infinities, of opposites, on the border between the inert and the living, so many expressions of this invisible, inaccessible light that goes back to the origins of the world.
They are an invitation to a form of intimacy with light, with the earth’s light…
Cyrielle Gulacsy was born in the Paris region in 1994. She lives and works in Paris. Her work evolves under the influence of modern science, towards the representation of an imperceptible reality of the order of abstraction, concealing the invisible laws of nature. Space-time, electromagnetism and the diffraction of light are all areas of research and experimentation that enable her to explore new representations of reality. In her work, she explores our perception of light through space and time, and reveals to us the matter of which it is composed. Each point, whether the measure of a particle or a celestial object, gives shape to an inaccessible reality and offers a view of the world around us that is both intimate and breathtaking.
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