The four artists have fully absorbed this new relational, performative, and immediate visual language generated by digital imagery, without necessarily conforming to it. Through their individual practices, they seek to preserve a space of ambiguity that dominant visual culture increasingly tends to close off in favour of immediate legibility. This ambiguity constitutes a theoretical position. 

Far from expressing anxiety, their paintings instead propose a form of acceptance of this instability. They suggest that uncertainty in representation is not a problem to be solved, but a condition to be inhabited.

The artists create images that are mobile, fluid, and almost ubiquitous within the very paradox of painting itself: as a material, stable, and enduring medium, painting remains physically present before us while simultaneously creating the conditions for its expansion within our imagination.

This relationship to mutability is approached from four distinct perspectives, placing these practices in constant movement between history, memory, identity, and contemporaneity: references to Old Masters and pictorial genres in Laia García’s work; the reinterpretation of ancient Chinese objects in Evian Wenyi Zhang’s practice; suspended and uncanny spaces and temporalities in Li Jun’s paintings; and the culture of communication alongside digital disruption in Noemi Durighello’s work.

In Evian Wenyi Zhang’s work, painting functions as a sensitive archival system. Drawing from ancient Chinese objects, the artist—who began her career in photography—extracts visual fragments that she reproduces, enlarges, and sequences until their details are transformed into mental landscapes. The result, evocative of a pixelated structure situated between fragmented memory and retinal archive, appears filtered through a human algorithm responding to personal and subjective criteria. This process of visual dissection, through close-up and repetition, offers renewed visibility to the motif, anchoring it in contemporaneity, and becomes a means for the artist to revisit and reinterpret her culture of origin.

Noemi Durighello’s works, meanwhile, interrogate contemporary modes of communication. Her paintings absorb graphic signs, everyday objects, letters, and visual languages, destabilising them through glitch aesthetics, layering, and ruptures of perspective. Between pop culture and digital disruption, the image appears interrupted in its transmission. Painting thus becomes a space of friction between analogue and digital influences, drawing us in through its physical presence.

Between Evian Wenyi Zhang and Noemi Durighello, a play of scale and repetition also emerges. Both artists work through motif and fragmentation, creating interferences between the micro and the macro. Evian’s paintings are perceived differently depending on our proximity to or distance from the work; intensified detail becomes landscape. In contrast, in Noemi’s works, saturation and the disruption of signs generate images in constant expansion, producing an immersive experience within the Kunsthalle.

In response to this tension, a quieter and more dreamlike dimension emerges in the works of Laia García and Li Jun. In Li Jun’s paintings, scenes seem to arise from suspended time, from an in-between space hovering between dream and estrangement. Presence and absence coexist simultaneously, as if something were on the verge of manifesting at any moment. Our gaze is invited to wander across the canvas, tracing the elements of a fragmented narrative without ever finding its centre. Instead, the canvas becomes a setting for the uncanny, a threshold shifting from interior to exterior, from an unsettling domestic space towards an
imagined landscape. 

Laia García’s paintings develop ambiguous and shifting forms. Inspired by motifs drawn from the history of painting, her works generate hybrid images oscillating between figure, still life, and landscape. The ethereal image never fully reveals itself; it continuously transforms within our perception, generating an almost neuroplastic image in which the senses themselves are activated before a work whose suggested presences constantly evade us.

What ultimately connects the practices of these four artists is their treatment of the mental image—its elusive nature, yet one fixed in matter and tangibility. This translation grants painting a particular autonomy. In contrast to the immateriality and immediacy of the digital image, painting restores density to representation.

In this context, painting appears as an act of resistance: against the immediate consumption of images and their permanent obsolescence, but also as a reaffirmation of the temporality of seeing. These works demand sustained attention. They remind us that looking remains a physical, relational, and sensorial experience, inviting us to reflect on a form of visual sustainability and an ecology of looking.

Through this sensorial and mental journey, an analogy emerges with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, from which the exhibition title is drawn. Like Alice crossing through the mirror, shifting in scale, moving through unstable spaces and mutable logics, constantly tested yet capable of adapting and reinventing herself, the viewer is invited to inhabit a space where all points of reference are in constant motion.

Text by Virginie Pislot, 2026