CURATEUR / MARC MOLK

“Suffering through you is not suffering”… In that beautiful song, Etienne Roda-Gil’s lyrics invite a long-gone love to come back, sit down, forget. It’s a somewhat weary invitation, but it seems to rest on the firm belief that the loved one will comply. The invitation is late, obsolete maybe, it comes after the pain – never mind. The lovers have just seen each other again for the first time, or maybe they will see each other later, it isn’t said. The abandoned one would like the other one to stay that day, as if they had never been apart.

It is thus possible to suffer without really suffering, as long as the origin of that suffering is beautiful, obvious, legitimate in the order of feelings. I have gathered here works that refer to those delicious heartaches that we may as well embrace rather than try to avoid or stifle them, unless we hope not to feel anything any more one day. It seems to me these paintings are suffused with that mix of pain and gratefulness, vulnerability and certainty, that feeling that doesn’t have a name, but which the phrase “Suffering through you is not suffering” makes conceivable. They illustrate the tough esthetic power of emotions.”