The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm

 

In Rear Window, Hitchcock turned a set of large windows into a stage for desire and betrayal. The protagonist, Jeff, obsessively observes his neighbors from his living room, believing himself to be a mere spectator of what goes on in the various homes of his block. Yet as the story progresses, he himself becomes part of the very narrative he was watching. The spy, spied upon. First through our own gaze as viewers of the film, but more significantly through the gaze of the characters he spies on. The window becomes, quite literally, a mirror that ultimately exposes the spectator.

 

Taking its title from a line by Wallace Stevens, The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm is grounded in that same ambivalence. The works gathered here offer images that open up spaces. They transform skies, folds, transparencies, and erasures into surfaces that act as passages toward other places. As in the Renaissance, when painting began to be understood as a window onto the world, each piece here serves as a conduit into a shared mental or sensory space.

 

With an archaeological approach, Megan Rea works through excavation. Her paintings seem to contain fossil-like layers, remnants of a buried story that peek through the paint and the handmade, recycled paper that forms the basis of her work. The support she works on is already a work of art in itself—made from pulped sketchbooks, it holds invisible traces and lost drawings that emerge as echoes of her own past. What Megan chooses to reveal is always in tension with what remains hidden.

 

To create this opening, Manon Steyaert begins with a process of folding. The artist manipulates the material into form through undulation. Straddling painting and sculpture, her works defy the frame and escape the flatness of the canvas. Her process is intuitive, shaped by the physical qualities of the materials—especially silicone, which she molds like fabric. The folds take shape through a repeated gesture, performed almost meditatively, until the structure is dressed. Looking at her work is to engage in an optical and tactile game. Through abstraction, Manon awakens our gaze and invites us to observe without certainties.

 

In Lola Ripoche’s work, appearances deceive. Her series Cumulus, Couchants and Sulfuré turn the atmosphere into a surface suspended between the beautiful and the toxic, the natural and the man-made, the visible and the hidden. Clouds, fog, sunsets… what at first glance might seem like an idyllic skyscape often reveals, on closer inspection, a natural disaster or a climatic disturbance. Ripoche confronts us with this double reading, between aesthetic pleasure and ecological anxiety, to focus on this perception, shaped and disrupted by the contradiction between beauty and threat.

 

In the self-referential work presented by Alexis Jang, a mother, her face marked by worry, cradles her sleeping child while a violent storm rages outside the window. The child, unaware of the danger, rests peacefully in her arms. Lightning briefly illuminates the landscape beyond the glass. The window does more than separate interior and exterior spaces but also reveals two entirely different atmospheres: the home as a fragile refuge, and the world outside as a latent threat. Through this quiet scene, Jang captures a profound emotional tension that doesn’t require dramatic gestures to speak of care and the desire to protect. Here, the window acts as a reminder of the world’s hostility, even within the relative safety of the domestic space.

 

To look is to become involved, in one way or another, with what is seen. The gaze is never unidirectional: it changes what it touches. This becomes a fitting metaphor to affirm that art, like Hitchcock’s window, doesn’t just show outer realities—realities that belong to the creator who imagines them—but also works in reverse, as a mirror that implicates the viewer. Art confronts us with what we are, what we long to be, and what we fear we might become.

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Curatorial text by Manuela Medina