I HAVE BEEN HERE FOR ONE MONTH AND NOBODY HAS WRITTEN TO ME YET

The small gallery room is home to Lisa Hecht's recent work. The Montreal artist, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago (Illinois), conceived and developed her proposal during a Parisian stay at the Cité internationale des arts and a visit to Basel as part of the Christoph Merian Foundation's international exchange program for professional visual artists. -Lisa Hecht evokes in a series of large-format photographs (90 x 60 cm) a whole work of reflection resulting from a very simple gesture, that of obstructing all the windows of her studio with sentences written in negative from her workbook. From the inside, the sentences appear inverted. As a result, they are addressed to the passer-by, that is to say, to no one and to everyone at the same time. -Lisa Hecht evokes in a series of large-format photographs (90 x 60 cm) a whole work of reflection resulting from a very simple gesture, that of obstructing all the windows of her studio with sentences written in negative from her workbook. From the inside, the sentences appear inverted. As a result, they are addressed to the passer-by, that is to say, to no one and to everyone at the same time. The strangeness that the potential reader may feel is moderated by the meaning of the sentences; they reveal some of the author's intimacy while maintaining anonymity. But the strangeness immediately returns with the astonishing image of a "talking light": as you enter the room, the daylight projects the letters onto the walls, the floor, the furniture; the right laterality of the reading is restored. And yet, even if this projection device still suggests tracing, scriptural lines, and ultimately drawing, everything contributes to suggesting the resonance of a voice that shouts out of nowhere while resonating from the depths of oneself. -Lisa Hecht would thus invite us to the photographic record of a spatial setting of this inner voice which, if it has given Descartes the assurance of his condition as a thinking subject, haunts the psychotic by coming to mobilize him from the outside, as President Schreber will have been able to say, to whom this voice asked, "continuously and without respite," he will specify: "What are you thinking about right now?"

—Translated from a text by Jean-Émile Verdier