Wonder

Juliette Barthe approaches painting as a territory of ambiguity, at once surface and image, matter and light, mirror and screen. By hybridizing painting with printing processes, she probes the material and perceptual limits of the image, as well as the ways in which it is constructed,

revealed, or withdrawn from view.

Created on retroreflective canvas, the works in Wonder extend a line of inquiry she has pursued for several years around the performativity of the medium. They resist immediate apprehension: the image, unstable, shifts with the light and the viewer’s position, appearing and fading

according to its own logic of manifestation.

Barthe invents a distinctive visual language situated between human gesture and mechanical process. The imprint becomes an act of resistance to the contemporary dematerialization of images, in an increasingly hyper-digital world where unstable, ever-shifting regimes of attention continuously redefine our relationship to the visible.

Her works evoke the idea of a first contact: the hand upon the wall. Barthe invokes the negative hand print in the Chauvet Cave, an archetypal trace of the human gaze, and places it in resonance with our everyday gestures on screens. The same dynamics of appearance are replayed; only the matter and the medium have changed.

By choosing the title Wonder, Barthe activates the term’s rich polysemy, which can refer in turn to questioning, astonishment, marvel, miracle, or wonderment. In doing so, she invites the viewer to adopt the posture of a potential visionary, akin to the one who might have stood before Antonello da Messina’s Annunciation.

Her canvases do not seek to represent but to be experienced. By subverting processes originally designed for reproduction and mass dissemination, Barthe reverses their purpose: where everything circulates too quickly, she reintroduces the possibility of slowing down. Confronted with her works, the viewer, accustomed to the unmeasured consumption of images, recovers the time to truly see.