Tatiana Trouvé's Brussels Exhibition Explores Being Lost And Found

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Artist Tatiana Trouvé's latest exhibition at Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels features a diverse array of sculptures, drawings, and installations spread across all three of the gallery's floors. The show, which continues through October 31, delves into themes of disorientation and discovery, a core tenet of Trouvé's artistic practice.

Trouvé shared her perspective on the exhibition, stating,“I spend my time making maps,” but simultaneously expressing a desire to feel“disoriented.” This contradiction, she explained, is central to her work, where objects and installations often blur the lines between reality and fiction. The artist, whose surname coincidentally means“found” in French, believes that“being lost is a way of finding oneself.” She elaborated,“When you get lost somewhere, you start looking at things differently. You begin rebuilding a path, not the way you already know, something else that allows you to feel awakened in a different way, to navigate your way and become attuned to things you don't notice when you know exactly how to get from A to B.”

The exhibition opens with L'inventario (2025), an installation resembling an inventory of studio materials. These items, cast in metal and stone, are meticulously arranged by type and size on bronze shelves designed to look like cardboard. The collection includes dried flowers, used soaps, shoes, bags, foam padding, paint bottles, books, paper folders, scrunchies, lighters, flattened soda cans, seashells, and pea pods. While many objects are familiar from Trouvé's actual studio, a significant portion are imagined, creating an uncanny effect.

Another series of sculptures in black cast iron and plaster abstractly chart noise pollution on the outskirts of Paris, their forms twisting and reaching into the air, challenging their supposed function as diagrams. This distortion of order is also evident in Trouvé's earlier breakthrough work, Bureau d'Activités Implicites (Bureau of Implicit Activities), developed between 1997 and 2007. This fictional office installation featured items like fabricated résumés, rejection letters, and unrealized project proposals, presenting a display of conceptual thought rather than tangible output.

Trouvé's drawings also feature a cosmological dimension, beginning with her pouring bleach onto industrial colored paper. As the bleach reacts with the dyes, she constructs intricate, overlapping, nebula-like scenes that blend natural and cosmic landscapes with architectural interiors and geometric forms.“I like this process of being confronted with something I have absolutely no mastery over, where I have to show inventiveness and reflection, and let myself be completely guided by the things themselves,” she noted. When asked about relinquishing control, Trouvé responded,“It's always hard, but I think there would be no interest left for me at all if I had control over all of this.” She added that she does not work in editions, finding repetition profoundly boring.“The only thing that interests me is what idea a sculpture has given me, what thoughts for the next one. In fact, my work is always about doors that must continuously open. It's a continuation of spaces.”

Growing up in Senegal after her family moved from Italy in 1976, Trouvé was influenced by the folkloric tradition of djinns, invisible spirits inhabiting gardens. This led her to imagine that humans, rather than djinns, might be the ghosts, a concept that extends into her current practice. Her Sitting Sculptures (2024–), for example, are designed to be sat upon, completing the artwork. Made of stone combined with bronze casts of foam padding and mattresses, these pieces transform materials typically used to support other sculptures into a means of supporting the viewer.“They no longer support the sculpture, but they support you,” Trouvé explained, noting,“There are no human figures, but the human is ever-present in my work, through its absence.”

Similarly, her well-known“Guardian” series (2013–) features cast stone and bronze sculptures of security guard chairs, often accompanied by personal belongings such as water bottles and books, evoking an absent human presence. Trouvé also imbues her sculptures with their own emotions and expectations. Pointing to an arrangement of plastic bottles, brushes, paint pallets, and squeezed tubes of oil paint, she remarked,“This is like a little sculpture that dreams of being a painting. I think objects have a life of their own.”

An untitled 2026 sculpture, resembling a coat rack made of patinated steel, painted aluminum, marble, onyx, and bronze, appears to have moved independently within the gallery. Twirling marks on the floor suggest it danced to its current position, with a nearby bucket of paint and more markings leading to black shoes emerging from or entering a wall. Trouvé observed,“Through her movement, in a sense, she is drawing,” adding that the installation“also recalls a person who is not there, these figures without bodies. It is also somewhat like ghosts passing through my work.”

Source: ARTnews

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