Zones de lumière, zones d’ombre brings the work of Rosa Barba, Rossella Biscotti, Kasper Bosmans, Gabriel Kuri and Felipe Mujica in dialogue with Walter Leblanc, marking the fortieth anniversary of the artist’s passing. The exhibition starts from a simple invitation: each guest artist was asked to select a work from the Walter & Nicole Leblanc Foundation’s collection and to develop a response from that encounter. Each choice reflects a different kind of affinity — formal, conceptual, material, or intuitive — becoming the point of departure for a dialogue with a newly commissioned or existing work.
The resulting exhibition unfolds through a multiplicity of perspectives. It brings renewed attention to works that have remained at the margins of established narratives, including a singular abstract drawing whose exceptional character resists easy classification. Other interventions connect works from different moments in Leblanc’s career, while one project reactivates an original engraving plate more than sixty years after its first use, extending both its material history and its capacity to produce new images. Rather than illustrating Walter Leblanc’s oeuvre, each artistic proposition opens a distinct path through it, revealing overlooked aspects, unexpected resonances, and alternative readings.
Together, these individual dialogues construct an open and experimental field rather than a unified interpretation. Different artistic languages, temporalities, and sensibilities coexist without seeking synthesis. The exhibition becomes a space of productive tension, where contemporary practices do not simply respond to Walter Leblanc’s work but test it, expand it, and allow it to resonate in relation to the present. The field of action is therefore not only the exhibition space itself, but also the network of relationships that unfolds between the collection, the invited artists, the archive, and the public.
The exhibition takes its title from a handwritten note by Walter Leblanc found during the ongoing study of his archive. The complete sentence reads: Zones de lumière, zones d’ombre: champ d’action en perpétuelle tension. This phrase surfaced only after the participating artists had already been invited and the conceptual framework of the exhibition had taken shape. Yet Leblanc’s words came to name what had already begun to emerge through the project. The second part of the sentence — a field of action in perpetual tension — reaffirms a curatorial approach: that of conceiving the exhibition as a space nourished by encounters, frictions and the continuous generation of intellectual and unexpected associations.
The discovery of this phrase was made possible through more than two years of archival research involving the digitisation, classification, and close analysis of thousands of documents, notebooks, photographs, correspondence, and unpublished materials. This long-term undertaking has been carried out through the collective efforts of archivists, researchers, students, and partner institutions, notably CKV, whose work has transformed the archive into an active space of research, dialogue, and exchange.
This exhibition also reflects the Foundation’s broader vision. While preservation remains fundamental to its mission, the archive is understood not only as a collection to be safeguarded but as a place from where artistic propositions can emerge. Through long-term collaborations with artists, researchers, and institutions, it becomes a site where knowledge is produced and relationships are formed. Each invited artist enters this ongoing history, offering another perspective through which Walter and Nicole Leblanc’s legacy can be interpreted, extended, and projected into the future. In this sense, Zones de lumière, zones d’ombre is not conceived simply as a commemoration, but as another chapter in a living history — one in which the archive remains an active resource and each collaboration becomes part of the Foundation’s own evolving story.
