Jean Arp wrote of the exact hour as a rupture in ordinary time — the moment when duration cracks open and something absolute passes through. This exhibition takes that instant as its premise: not time measured, but time undergone; not the clock, but the vertigo of standing inside a moment that is simultaneously vanishing and permanent.

Keita Morimoto — born in Osaka, formed between Japan and Canada, now returned to Tokyo — carries within his practice the full weight of that itinerary. His paintings think through light the way the Baroque masters did: not as a physical phenomenon but as an ontological event. In Caravaggio or de la Tour, light does not describe the world — it decides what deserves to exist within it. Morimoto inherits this question and transplants it into the contemporary city, where a solitary streetlamp, a glowing window, a distant farmhouse burning amber against the blue hour become the modern equivalents of the candle flame — sites where the sacred and the industrial, the ancient and the disposable, hold each other in unresolved tension.

His return to charcoal after a decade is a willed act of reduction — not loss, but clarification. In relinquishing color, he strips perception down to its structural conditions — the threshold, the tree, the facade — and asks what remains when the seductive fullness of paint is withdrawn. What remains, these drawings suggest, is something prior to image: a geometry of appearing, the world at the exact moment before it becomes legible.

Nina Molloy works from a different but convergent compulsion. Based in New York, trained at NYU, she follows what she herself describes as an urge to paint spaces and things that feel carved out and hollow — presences defined as much by what they withhold as by what they offer. Her approach is less systematic than it is receptive: the prepared surface is not a support but an armature, a field of resistance to which she responds rather than imposes. Found sticks, organic fragments, accumulations of matter — these are not chosen for their symbolic legibility but for the way they arrest attention, suspending the object between its material facticity and the vast web of human meaning, habit, and projection that surrounds it.

To paint, for Molloy, is ultimately to listen. As the late Wolf Kahn observed, the painter who has finally silenced the noise of other voices discovers they are listening not to themselves but to the paint. It is this quality of surrendered attention — the hand following the material rather than commanding it — that gives her work its particular philosophical charge. Each painting becomes less a representation than an act of contact: the point at which the boundary between the one who perceives and the thing perceived quietly loses its necessity.

Together, Morimoto and Molloy propose that the exact hour is not a moment on a clock but a condition of seeing — available only to those willing to slow down until the world, in its silence, begins to speak.

Text by Esma Derdour