The Fondation Le Corbusier, in collaboration with the MassimodeCarlo gallery, presents the Diane Dal-Pra exhibition at Maison La Roche.
“Fire: that which cannot be extinguished in this ash…”
In Génie du non-lieu (2001), the art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman returns to an idea first articulated by Jacques Derrida: that the image is a living ash. Not a record of what was, not a simple remnant, but the trace of something that has passed through and left its mark – holding absence and presence at once, persisting in the way fire persists in ash: invisible, latent, refusing to be fully extinguished. It is this condition – survival without conclusion, presence without declaration – that Diane Dal-Pra makes her subject in Second by Second.
Dal-Pra’s works burn at a low, persistent heat. These large oils on linen are built slowly, each layer adding to the last until something emerges that could not have been planned or rushed. Dal-Pra paints from memory rather than observation – drawn to the way time distorts what it touches: how recollection bends a shape, bleaches a colour, makes a room feel larger than it ever was. These paintings do not try to show the world as it is. They show what remains of it.
And what they hold is extraordinarily intimate. In Liminal Hours, translucent green planes dissolve into one another, a draped form and its shadow trading places until neither feels more real than the other. In Pressed Against Memories, a chestnut braid runs down the canvas like a fault line, dividing the surface into three distinct worlds – beige upholstery, purple silk, rippling blue textile – each rendered with the precision of a still life, each quietly estranged from the others. Hair becomes landscape. Fabric becomes terrain. The body is present everywhere and nowhere, absorbed into the material world it once moved through. In Second by Second – the title work – a deep red surface fractures outward from a luminous centre, lines spreading like the map of something that has just cracked open or is slowly becoming whole.
There are moments, Dal-Pra writes, that do not arrive all at once – that unfold second by second, as though time itself hesitates to choose a form. Reality scatters, fractures, reveals intervals where something undefined begins to circulate. A life shifts in layers, each one pressing down on the last until something new has formed without anyone quite having noticed. It is inside these intervals that Dal-Pra works – and the title of this exhibition is born. For her, objects are never incidental to this: they absorb what passes through them, outlasting the moments that charged them, becoming witnesses to a life in motion. The braided hair, the folded silk, the fractured red ground – they carry what has passed through them. They hold it quietly, the way ash holds fire.
Motherhood is present in this body of work without ever being its subject – the most immediate and personal of those intervals. Dal-Pra has described it as “the most organic passage of my life” – a slow and continuous transformation, identity doubling and unfolding layer after layer. It gave her a new relationship to time: not as something that passes, but as something that generates.
Maison La Roche – designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret between 1923 and 1925 – was built from the beginning as a space for living with art. It is here that Dal-Pra’s paintings find their latest home – surfaces that accumulate rather than declare, that hold their meaning in layers, that reveal themselves slowly and on their own terms. The ash, as we have come to understand it, is never cold.
Diane Dal-Pra
Diane Dal-Pra was born in 1991 in Périgueux, France. She lives and works in Paris.
Dal-Pra works primarily in large-scale oil on linen, building her paintings slowly and in layers, from memory rather than observation. Trained in the technical precision of the Renaissance painters she cites as significant influences, her work has progressively moved away from the figure toward something more elusive – a presence sensed rather than seen. The body is no longer depicted so much as implied: in the weight of a fold, the trace of a braid, the suggestion of something that has only just left the frame. Dal-Pra describes her practice as an attempt to paint the in-between state – the space where an image is never entirely formed nor entirely dissolved, where time does not disappear but accumulates in sensitive layers. Her palette, subtle and tonal, and her smooth, almost imperceptible brushwork hold the work in a state of equilibrium – material and immaterial at once, grounded and dissolving.
Dal-Pra’s work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; HEM Museum, Foshan; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris and the ICA Miami, Miami.