DES BAINS is pleased to present Heurtebise, a group exhibition curated by Riccardo Greco, featuring works by Laura Benson, Johanna Hedva, Angelo Iodice, Jessica Luostarinen and Jacopo Mazzetti.
Taking its title from the androgynous and enigmatic figure of the chauffeur-angel in Orphée by Jean Cocteau, Heurtebise, gloved and discreet, facilitates passage through mirrors, treating them not as surfaces but as permeable portals. The exhibition unfolds within this logic of transit, as a space in which bodies, objects and images are held in states of latent tremor, suspension and return.
Rather than staging Surrealism as a visual language, the exhibition approaches it as a condition of passage, historically shaped as much by its omissions as by its forms. In this sense, it gestures toward submerged genealogies of the movement, traceable in works such as Dark Spring by Unica Zürn or the unfinished film The Witch’s Cradle by Maya Deren, in which Surrealism unfolds not as spectacle but as a space of interiority and embodied knowledge, a more intimate and subterranean line that both traverses and displaces its more canonical formulations.
Within the exhibition, matter appears in states of instability. It condenses until it becomes a passage, structures both support and wound, and objects accumulate as carriers of memory rather than fixed meaning. The body is never fully present nor entirely absent, but persists through processes of fragmentation, concealment and recomposition.
Operativity emerges as process, activated through repetition, containment and gesture. Forms suggest protection while simultaneously exposing vulnerability; containers become sites of capture as much as preservation. Authorship loosens, allowing the works to remain open to manipulation, displacement and transformation over time. Anatomical metallic Venuses, shell memoirs, napkins from a phantom banquet present themselves as portraits of silent figures.
Voluble forms coagulate into structures that oscillate between relic and apparition. A velvet tower rises as an ambiguous signal, at once refuge and device of capture, traversed by a restrained vitality that unsettles its stillness. Elsewhere, a bouquet emerges from a rectilinear head, surfacing from an already compromised matter in which blossoming does not redeem but insists as a venefic excess, holding within it a promise of disintegration. A blackened hand supports small votive flames, not in an act of devotion but of consumption, a minimal altar in which transformation unfolds as a slow, deliberate combustion.
Heurtebise does not resolve these tensions but sustains them, proposing the exhibition as a space of continuous negotiation. Here, unease is not an event but a condition, a state of suspension in which the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, remain in constant exchange.