27/03/2026
Opening tomorrow at the Gallery & Project space by PLUS-ONE Projects
Xavier Noiret-Thomé ‘REVIVER’: 28.03.2026 — 25.04.2026
44 Palindromes colliding on the works of: Jacques André, Isabelle Arthuis, Joseph Beuys, Fred Bervoets, Herbert Brandl, Marcel Broodthaers, Edward Burne-Jones, François Curlet, Jacques-Louis David, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, James Ensor, Henri Fantin-Latour, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Michel François, Angela Grauerholz, Aurélie Gravas, Hans Hartung, Kati Heck, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Per Kirkeby, Zoe Leonard, Jacques Lizène, Erwan Mahéo, Emilio Lopez Menchero, André Masson, Julien Meert, Mon Colonel & Spit, Ria Pacquée, Éric Poitevin, Sébastien Reuzé, Félicien Rops, Yvan Salomone, Victor Servranckx, Josh Smith, Walter Swennen, Antoni Tàpies, Christophe Terlinden, Marc Trivier, Janaina Tschäpe, Philippe Vandenberg, Victor Vasarely, Henk Visch.
REVIVER
28.03.’26 - 25.04.’26
Opening: Saturday 28.03.’26 from 1 to 6 pm
PLUS-ONE Projects
Vlaamsekaai 73
2000 Antwerp - BE
www.plus-one.be
[email protected]
Contact
Jason Poirier dit Caulier
[email protected]
+32 (0) 495 24 82 99
Thomas De Ben
[email protected]
+32 (0) 498 26 50 44
Artist statement
It begins with a gesture both simple and quietly radical: inscribing a palindrome, a sentence that reads the same forward and backward, onto a work of art. The first act takes place on an engraving by James Ensor, a self-portrait encircled by demons, upon which the phrase “ingirum imus nocte ecce et consumimur igni” is laid. Night wandering, the circle of fire, a slow self-consumption. The text does not describe the image, nor does it explain it; it moves through it, infiltrates it, awakens it. It breathes. It turns back on itself. In doing so, it sets the image in motion, so that the gaze can no longer rest without being drawn back into the loop.
That initial gesture already contains everything that follows, compacted, coiled, ready to unfold. 22 + 22 extends as a system of returns, passages, and continuous transformations. Each palindrome reactivates reading, bends the trajectory of the gaze, and displaces the work’s center of gravity. Nothing repeats identically. What returns is never the same, because the act of returning itself alters, erodes, and intensifies. The circle does not close; it is crossed.Within this movement, an ancient murmur can be heard, the thought of Heraclitus, taken up and stretched by Nietzsche.
One may step into the river again, says Heraclitus, but never into the same water. The gesture repeats; the river does not. Nietzsche radicalizes this intuition: eternal return is not the promise of sameness, but the ordeal of becoming, the demand to affirm what returns precisely because it returns otherwise. Time does not advance in a straight line; it turns, insists, and begins again by deforming itself.
The palindrome, placed upon a work already laden with its own strata, operates in this unstable interval. It seems to offer formal stability, a sentence closed upon itself, but this closure fractures the moment it enters into resonance with the underlying image. The text looks at the work; the work reads the text. They reflect one another, interfere, and contaminate. Neither can stand alone. From this superposition emerges an active palimpsest, a layering without hierarchy, in which the gaze oscillates, returns, hesitates, and moves on. The result is not synthesis but vertigo, the sense of meaning perpetually on the verge of coincidence and perpetually displaced. As with the river, what appears identical is already flowing away.
This vertigo is not a loss, but a condition. The work becomes thickened time, charged with visible and invisible layers. Each inscription preserves what precedes it while altering it. Nothing is erased; everything is replayed. The past does not sleep; it circulates, insists, and returns otherwise. The time of the work is neither linear nor fixed; it is spiraled, crossed by returns that shift its form.
The material circulation of the works extends this logic. Acquired, exchanged, offered, sometimes given, they move from hand to hand, from gaze to gaze, changing value, status, and intensity. Nothing settles. This is not possession, but passage, the acceptance that the work is always in transit, marked by what it has crossed.
The artists involved form no fixed constellation, but a network of passages. Each work is a threshold, each gesture a crossing. Friendship, exchange, and circulation become active forces, structuring the project from within and sustaining a flow in which no position is final.
At the center of this mechanism, the palindrome persists. It returns without repeating, connects without fixing, and closes only to reopen. A closed structure traversed by incessant movement, it holds together form and becoming, return and escape, memory and instant.
22 + 22 is not an accumulation of augmented works. It is a moving imaginary museum, a space of passages where images, words, and gazes intersect, respond, and transform one another. Art history unfolds here not as a straight line, but as eddies, layers, and differentiated returns.
A kaleidoscopic gallery where images and words act as generators of collision, rendering time and space unstable dimensions, endlessly recomposable.
Text by: Xavier Noiret-Thomé
