InVisible
Sophie Whettnall

D’une rive, l’autre opens the exhibition with a sculpture created in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, along the Seine. Inspired by the landscape visible from the opposite bank—close yet inaccessible—the work results from a dialogue between public and private space. It creates a space within a space, allowing for contemplation or a revisit of the landscape. In this piece, Sophie Whettnall balances the monumental and the everyday, the intimate and the transparent: a fertile opposition where magic happens.

This tension between direct perception and withdrawal continues in a series of works on satin—Invisible & Shifting Landscape. Since 2022, Sophie Whettnall has been using this fluid, reflective, and elusive fabric, which is also associated with the feminine. She prints discreet, almost ghostly forms onto it. By playing with shadows and reflections, the artist questions the invisibilization of women, their gestures, and their memories. These works reveal as much as they conceal, inviting a sensitive attention, echoing the themes of disappearance and appearance that run throughout the exhibition.

This intimate relationship with landscape takes sculptural form in Layer Cake. Each sculpture combines a stool, a pedestal, a copper plate, and a Fontainebleau rock painted with India ink. These compositions, like a forest of stones, evoke nature contained within the exhibition space. The sculptures converse with a Japanese landscape aesthetic based on careful observation, slowness, and the layering of forms and materials. The confrontation between nature’s time and exhibition time is tangible here, in these stratified objects where each layer carries a memory, a gesture, a tension. This logic of layers and lines directly resonates with the Plaster Landscape series displayed upstairs in the gallery.

There, Sophie Whettnall creates abstract topographies from torn paper, forming mental landscapes traversed by memory, erosion, and perception. These works demonstrate the same attention to material, to fragments, and to the slow development of forms, where the invisible emerges in the interstices of the paper.

This exploration unfolds on a much larger scale in Ratrack Project, a triptych video installation. Created during a residency at the 3D Foundation in Verbier, the work stages a monumental and ephemeral drawing traced in the snow using a snowcat, whose original purpose was subverted to create this performance. This landscape-scale drawing engages not only the mountainside as a support but also involves mountain workers who participated in the act. A bond was formed through this collaboration. The result, partially uncontrollable, exists on the boundary of the visible, between mastery and chance. The landscape becomes a living archive—fragile, ephemeral.

Finally, a mural painting concludes the exhibition. This wall painting, conceived for the gallery space, acts as a monumental sketch, a work in progress. It anticipates Sophie Whettnall’s major project for the Toulouse Metro, planned for 2027. With this gesture, she brings a work conceived for the public space into the intimate context of an exhibition venue, thus closing the circle begun with D’une rive, l’autre. The back-and-forth between private and public space, between the scale of the body and the scale of territory, runs throughout the entire project. The artist continues her sensitive exploration of landscape, light, and time, always at the limit of what the eye can grasp.

Born in 1973, Sophie Whettnall lives and works in Brussels.
Winner of the Belgian Art Prize in 1999, her work has been exhibited notably at the 52nd Venice Biennale, at MAC’S Grand-Hornu, BOZAR and La Centrale (Brussels), Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Salt Lake City), Galleria degli Uffizi (Florence), CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães (Brazil), COAC (Barcelona), STUK (Leuven), Chiostri di San Pietro, and La Fondazione Palazzo Magnani (Reggio Emilia), as well as at TANK (Shanghai, Wiels Selection).

Her works are part of numerous public and private collections, both in Belgium and internationally.