Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Nigel Baldacchino

Entering the exhibition is first and foremost like entering a cave carved into the foundations of the historic city of Valletta, Malta. Valletta Contemporary gallery reveals layers that lead downwards into the bowels of the building, down to the last room whose metamorphic walls recall an organic womb. In this environment, Anne Immelé's exhibition vision takes shape, summarized in the title of those eyes - these eyes - they fade. The title questions the objectivity of the vision. It invites the visitor to put aside beliefs and enter a limbo, a state of suspension between the real and the imaginary. In this opaque atmosphere, the outlines fade, and the works of the four artists vibrate harmoniously. The symphony tuned by the French curator exalts the ambiguity of feelings, an oblique perspective, and an osmotic tension between the parts.

Soon a "mineral cascade" captures the visitor's gaze with its imposing size. It's a karst formation, a stratigraphy of time. And it is time, as an index of human frailty and precariousness, a key to reading the work by Bénédicte Blondeau. The Belgian photographer with the series 'Ce qu'il Reste' reshapes human ambition, reducing it to a thin geological layer as much as recalling the fictional dimension of the image.

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Darkness welcomes the viewer among the works of Awoiska Van der Molen that shine of their own light instead. That of the Dutch artist is an essay on the uncertainty of urban nature. These glimpses are evidence of an ephemeral and marginal monumentality, as much as an anticipation of a search heading towards increasingly native and sylvan existentialism. 

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

The transition to Nigel Baldacchino's photographs is spontaneous, twin, and permeable. An invitation to suspend judgment, a sinking into perception itself. The exhibition also proposes the gradual dissolution of languages in favor of the phenomenology of questioning itself. As well said by the author himself, "I like the idea of describing something and failing, like a weak flash of light across a huge object. None of the truths I have ever encountered have been ‘complete’, in a way, and that’s also what poetry is for."

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

The thickness of the beliefs becomes subtle, at most transparent, like Bernard Plossu's interrupted road that stops against a pyramid of rocks and sand in Egypt, as if to rebound the rational expectations of human feeling. But all this raises awareness, an implicit need to reformulate anthropocentric stoicism. It is no coincidence that human presence is rather fleeting, like ghosts of a past that is now incomprehensible or unbearable. It is not a praise of naturalism but a desire to mirror one's posture, observe, and understand it. And the young generations seem to nourish themselves of this condition, forced to deal with the pressing challenges of climate change and an increasingly suffering planet. Bernand Plossu's images, in this sense, are a tribute to spontaneity, which deny a decisive moment in favor of unsophisticated gestures. The depicted flight of the bird that hovers above the world's gravity and its concerns, or the look that embraces the silences of the deserts appear as metaphors of an existential stillness, understood as a natural flow of events and the impossibility of freezing eternity.

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Nigel Baldacchino

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Nigel Baldacchino

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

Installation view 'those eyes - these eyes - they fade,' Valletta Contemporary, Malta 2022. Credit Laura Besancon

In such sensorial circularity, in the succession of evocative, almost ritual apparitions, one can feel the primordial force of the image that anticipates and postpones photography. It's not a precise narration, neither we find healing, but an invitation to a lyrical, restless, nomadic, and vital abandonment.