Bringing together works created between 2015 and 2026, Olivia Malena Vidal’s exhibition reflects a practice shaped by movement from one medium to another. Photography, painting, drawing and collage are not approached as separate fields, but as different ways of exploring, transposing and translating the same enduring preoccupation: the image.
The image is at once subject, material and point of departure. It is looked at, photographed, painted, cut, covered, enlarged or reduced. It shifts in context, scale and status. A photograph becomes a painting, a drawing becomes a photograph, a found image may be incorporated into a collage and subsequently covered with paint. Each transformation creates a distance: something of the original image remains, while something new emerges.
This way of working is accompanied by a reflection on the act of looking. To delve into an image, to observe architecture through a reflection or an opening, to shift one’s point of view: looking becomes a means of exploring space and apprehending what is seen. Reality is never quite confronted head-on; it emerges through detours, shifts in framing and layers of superimposition.
This relationship to the image is also rooted in art history. Over time, certain images are retained, gathered and preserved as traces of encounters, references or fascinations. Together, they form a visual memory that can be fragmented, layered and recomposed. The works of other artists gradually become a personal material, a field of exploration.
In this relationship to images, there is first the gaze of the viewer, attentive to the images that surround her; then that of the collector, who gathers and preserves them; and finally, that of the artist, who cuts, assembles, covers and transforms them, allowing her own forms to emerge from these fragments.
Over the years, reality has gradually given way to abstraction. Architecture, landscapes, natural elements and encountered images are transformed into lines, colors and rhythms. Verticality, a recurring motif in Vidal’s work, remains a persistent presence, as the painterly gesture gradually frees itself from representation.
Lines of Passage evokes the lines that run through the works, but also lines of thought, of vision and of transformation. It suggests a way of finding one’s place not by remaining in the same position, but by moving from one form to another, gradually constructing one’s own visual language.
Written by Brigitte Vidal

Monday: by appointment
Tue, Wed, Thu: 9 a.m.–12 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.–5 p.m.
Fri: 9 a.m.–2 p.m.