Diane Severin Nguyen × Linda Lach

Tensions become perceptible in space, emerging from an indefinite elsewhere beyond images and objects, echoing like barely audible voiceovers. In-betweenness lingers, thickening into a suspension at the threshold where rhythm begins to shift: a surface to pierce, a depth that pierces back.
This juxtaposition does not generate a singular punctum in the Barthesian sense1 — a detail that wounds, that involuntarily pierces — but rather a never-ending curve around it. The rupture’s wound does not disappear, but loses its sharpness, becoming harder to locate. A sense of stuckness pervades this coagulated reality, a liminal space at the edge between things and their double, between objects and their histories, caught in a matryoshka-like cumulativeness which endlessly reveals and withholds. We are held by this latent aesthetic force, pulling perception apart in a timeless zone.
A seductive repulsion invites us to remove a viscous patina spread across objects and images. An indeterminate violence lies beneath, where personal archives and historical events condense into a strange intimacy marked by comfortable discomfort. Moving through the space, we are suspended in transition, between surface and depth, between the layers of an incomprehensible reality.
Diane Severin Nguyen’s photographs stage this tension through synthetic vanitas: vaguely familiar forms coated in artificial snow, as distorted still lives in which frost has left a residue. They convey a sense of brokenness, detached from any stable source, oscillating between attraction and repulsion, as the distinction between life and death dissolves.
Decadence lies in the aesthetic seduction of pop imagery: a kind of hermeneutic intensity that conceals a madness, a lack or distortion within the historical events that shape reality. Light structures this atmosphere: from the darkness of Workers Bouquet (2025) to the gradual emergence of illumination in Drain the Whole Sea (2025), Victory (2025), and Shining Like Videotape (2025), where time unfolds as suspended duration.
Linda Lach’s sculptures invade and reject through their physical presence. They anchor the space in the immediacy of the object, where presence is given without a corresponding affect, leaving something unresolved, suspended. Works such as morning greetings will bear fruit (2026) — a copy of a traditional Japanese getabako, a wooden shoe cabinet typically placed in kindergarten or school entryways, structured through repeated compartments — and Aw-chucks! (2026) — a crystal garland made of several cut vases from historical Polish glasswork Violetta — transform everyday objects into displaced doubles, invoking both personal and collective histories.
These forms reflect on labor and the handmade, exposing a tension between intimate space and public display, between solids and voids, a logic that extends to I started living in a shoebox recently (2026), a fabric bundle hung on the wall, and let’s go over the bonus situation (2025), a wooden shelf that contains composite, fragile materials.
The immediacy of these objects is undermined by their compromised functionality. Like Nguyen’s images, they persist as ghosts, replicas that still transmit an aura2, or rather affect, through projection and personal memory.
Time no longer unfolds linearly but accumulates. There is no rupture, only permanence without climax. The wound no longer strikes as a point but diffuses across surfaces. What remains is not life, nor death, but a continuous present — a seductive, repulsive condition in which nothing collapses, and therefore nothing can be released.

Matteo Giovanelli

1. R. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980.
2. W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936.