PNEUMA – Michèle Janata: Guest artist: Pascal Decaillet

We live poised within the etheran elemental milieu at once elusive and utterly vital to our being. With each breath we commune with pneuma (Gk. πνεῦμα), that subtle, invisible current that informs our imagination, stirs our emotions, and anchors our sense of belonging. Air that neither glows nor yields to touch, and yet commands our unreserved trust.

In her installations, Michèle Janata renders this silent visible. She arranges wafer-thin, hand-blown glass objects. Some suffused with an opalescent sheen, others rendered nearly diaphanous,to intercept a 532 nm laser and shifting ambient light. What unfolds before us are pulsating geographies of respiration: energetic cartographies that entwine body, mind, and cosmos into a single, breathing matter.

By modulating light intensity and angle, Janata animates the apparently immutable. The result is a diaphanous lattice of glass and light that quivers like inhalation and exhalation made manifest.

Pascal Decaillet extends the exhibition’s sensorial field with an olfactory topography. For Strangely Elated, he has designed weighty, hand-crafted flacons, each imbued with his bespoke scent compositions. These containers function as talismans of memory and ritual, inviting the viewer into personal inner landscapes, archaeologies of scent that linger long after perception.

Pneuma eschews linear narration in favor of a circular, breathing logic. Tender yet inexorable, the exhibition reminds us that the invisible is never insignificant, and that genuine movement often emerges at the threshold between presence and absence.

Curated by Wiktoria Tundys
Graphic: Michèle Janata
Images: Vitor de Oliveira

Michèle Janata - portfolio

Pascal Decaillet - portfolio