« NOT YET A MEANING » presents a quiet dialogue between French photographer Éric Poitevin and Finnish artist Elsa Salonen. Beneath a shared minimalist visual grammar, the two artists approach nature from divergent paths, finding a subtle resonance in a fundamental inquiry: how do we perceive existence?
Éric Poitevin’s photography is a deliberate act of «subtraction.» He reduces the medium to a direct presentation where the image simply is. His work is built upon a rigorous mechanism of removal—stripping away context, narrative, and emotional suggestion. His images reject the «decisive moment» in favor of a sustained, elongated state of time.
Produced under strictly controlled conditions, Poitevin’s method exudes a sense of classical rigor and minimalism. Subjects are «uprooted» from their original contexts by shadowless white backgrounds, denying the viewer the comfort of a backstory and forcing a direct confrontation with the object itself. In his Plants series, each specimen is presented at a 1:1 scale; as the plants vary in size, so too do the dimensions of the works. In a space devoid of reference, these plants stand with a posture that is at once delicate and resolute, achieving a tactile, sculptural quality—a monumental solemnity.
Poitevin remains wary of the rhetoric of Romanticism, the «picturesque,» or ecological moralizing. He does not seek to depict or comment on the forests of the Meuse; instead, he reveals the intrinsic truth of natural things: their sensory essence, their density,
and their duration. Avoiding the drama of chiaroscuro, he bathes his subjects in a uniform, diffused light that settles evenly across every pixel. His work has no intention to «move» or «educate» the viewer; it is an honest, unvarnished presentation of an object’s «true state.»
In contrast, Elsa Salonen’s practice is one of transformation rather than representation. Based on the observation that changes in life cycles are signaled by changes in color, she extracts pigments from plants using ancient alchemical techniques. These are preserved in glass flasks and displayed alongside the decolored, white floral remains. This ritualistic act—separating the pigment as «energy» or «soul» from the fiber as «flesh»—is both a physical and a literary dissociation.
Salonen’s work is deeply informed by alchemy and animism: traditions that view the natural world as a sentient presence. In the Finnish tradition of nature worship, it is believed that every environment is overseen by a guardian spirit (haltija) who protects the land. Consequently, Salonen works exclusively with natural pigments, grinding meteorites, animal bones, seashells, and botanicals into her media.
Each substance carries its own temporal scale and ancestral knowledge. Here, the pigment is no longer just a medium; it is the concept itself. By mixing meteorite dust with organic matter, she links microscopic phytochemistry to macroscopic cosmic evolution, echoing the truth that terrestrial life is kin to stardust.
Within the gallery, two distinct practices engage in conversation:
On one side is Poitevin’s Stasis — the decontextualized object manifesting in the absolute present.
On the other is Salonen’s Flux — matter in a constant state of translation between time and energy.
One tends toward the minimal and the neutral, reaching depth through a level gaze; the other points toward symbolism and transmutation, revealing invisible connections through the very fabric of matter.
This juxtaposition acts as a mechanism for the «re-calibration» of sight. When the image is reduced to as it is and matter is deconstructed into what it contains, the viewer is guided into a perception of time removed from daily experience. Nature ceases to be a resource or a backdrop; it becomes a field of existence that demands to be re-seen and re-understood.
The exhibition thus becomes a sensory and meditative encounter: finding strangeness in the non-narrative gaze, sensing time in the traces of transformation, and ultimately shifting our attention from the «interpretation of meaning» to the «manifestation of being.»
It is a slow calibration. We stop rushing to understand and simply pause to see how a thing exists. Here, nature does not explain itself, nor does it point elsewhere. The exhibition is, in the end, quite simple: on one side, how things look; on the other, the traces of what has occurred. Together, they point not to a specific meaning, but to a slowed-down temporality—the gradual revelation of existence itself.
