IRL

Three letters that have become familiar. They appear in our conversations to distinguish what happens “in real life” from what takes place on our screens. And yet today, that distinction seems increasingly difficult to make.

We live in a world where images often precede experience. Landscapes are photographed before they are truly looked at. Memories are archived before they are lived. Faces are filtered, voices corrected, narratives rewritten, while artificial intelligence produces images, texts and sounds whose origins can sometimes become impossible to identify.

As representations grow increasingly precise, they seem gradually to replace the reality they were once meant to document. The image no longer reflects the world: it ultimately becomes a model for it.

IRL brings together three artistic practices that question this transformation without ever offering a single, unequivocal answer.

The paintings of Morgan Bisoux play with our desire for perfection. Their technical virtuosity unsettles the gaze and questions our contemporary fascination with surfaces that are ever smoother, more seductive and more flawless. They remind us that representation is never neutral: it also shapes the way we perceive the world.

The photographs and installations of Gabriele Chirienti reintroduce matter, chance and accident. Far removed from perfectly controlled images, they allow what resists control to emerge: traces, imperfections, tensions between objects, spaces and bodies. They restore depth and substance to a reality we sometimes move through without truly seeing it.

With his sound installation, Markus Mehr shifts our attention towards a medium that can neither be frozen nor possessed. Sound exists only for the duration of listening. It asks the visitor to slow down, to inhabit the present moment, and to experience a form of presence that escapes the logic of the image.

By bringing these three approaches together, IRL does not seek to oppose the digital and the real, nor to condemn contemporary technologies. Instead, the exhibition invites us to question the way we inhabit the world at a time when representations sometimes seem to take the place of experience itself.

What remains of reality when its image becomes more important than reality itself?

Perhaps the real has never disappeared.

Perhaps it is simply waiting for us to learn how to look at it again.