TIM EITEL | Is the moon there when nobody looks?

We are pleased to announce Tim Eitel’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from 17 October to 12 December 2026. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, 17 October, from 4 to 9 pm, in the presence of the artist. On this occasion, Nicolas Marbeau, Project Manager for Contemporary Programmes at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, has been invited to write a text accompanying the exhibition.

One might see, in this woman, engrossed as she kneels down to draw, a Fate at work. The line doubling as it is traced might recall Pliny, who, in his Natural History, attributes the origin of painting to the outlining of a man’s shadow. One might see in this couple walking away into the night an Orpheus who has not yet turned back, accompanied by an Eurydice who has not yet vanished. One might see in this woman seated in a waiting room – ordinary enough were it not edged in black – a sojourn in limbo.

Through these mythical and archetypal forms, Tim Eitel binds art to human destiny, overlaying layers of meaning onto a present called forth by nothing more than a pair of trainers, an armchair, or a mobile phone. What lies ahead is perhaps less important than what these figures have seen and retained from the past, which seems to haunt them. He plays upon this residual presence through tempera, a medium that allows him to evoke earlier stages of the work and leave visible certain pentimenti. Is that iridescent line – a rosy-fingered twilight near this lunar disc – the bleed of a sunset or a colour ground? In Eitel’s work, there is never a frame. His canvases delimit themselves: lines and edges divide them, distinguishing separate moments. On these surfaces, which become spaces of experience, one might see negatives onto which events are printed, leaving it to the viewer to construct their own cuts and continuity.

What these expanses of wall record is not merely a past, but a period of latency between two images – that very delay which becomes the condition of vision itself. It is the time light takes to reach us, the duration Goethe measures when experimenting on his own eye to study afterimages: the eye is not static; it demands contrast. His flat planes are no longer walls, but necessary colours and surfaces, what the brain creates when exposed to a single hue paired with an absence. What is painted here is perhaps the work of the viewer. Engaging with Tim Eitel’s canvases demands active involvement, an investment of time that the contemporary world relentlessly tries to deprive us of.

This painting predicts nothing: it reveals the gap between what takes place and the moment we observe it. Whatever the Fates foretold has already come to pass; the artworks remain in expectation

Nicolas Marbeau

Translation : Sadie Fletcher