25 November 2025 – 16 January 2026
Vivienne Roberts Projects
Vivienne Roberts Projects is hosting a group exhibition dedicated to the most fragile yet most powerful moment in artistic creation: sudden, involuntary, inexplicable memory. The show is titled La Madeleine de Proust.
Taking its name from Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine scene, the exhibition focuses on how a taste, a scent, or a texture can hurl a person, in an instant, back into the depths of their inner world. That moment Proust describes—when time is suspended and remembering rises not from thought but from the body—is a threshold.
And it shares a profound kinship with the silent instant in which a painting is born.
The artists’ memory: remembering without knowing, creating without thinking
The artists in the show are not illustrating Proust’s text; they are inhabiting the space it opened.
Each of them knows that creation often does not spring from conscious thought: an accidental colour, a brushstroke that appears unbidden on the hand, the unexpected reaction of a surface.
Sometimes the shadow of a feeling forgotten for years, sometimes a sense of familiarity felt in an image of unknown origin, becomes the starting point of the painting.
Philip Guston’s idea that “painting only begins once all the voices have left the studio” resonates here.
The ego dissolves, time expands, the artist’s mind sets off on a directionless walk through its own dark regions; creation takes shape not in the realm of will, but of surrender.
A memory is triggered, the painting speaks
La Madeleine de Proust is not an exhibition of narrative; it is an exhibition of feeling.
The works on view focus on moments such as
– an unexpected void that opens on a surface,
– the emotional tension carried by a form of uncertain origin,
– a familiarity that is touched and immediately slips away.
Like Proust’s madeleine, these paintings summon the viewer to a connection that catches them unprepared:
the instant of seeing again, for the first time, something you thought you remembered.
An invitation
La Madeleine de Proust offers a journey toward that fragile threshold of memory—the place that cannot be explained yet is deeply felt.
Just as a taste can open a door to the past, a painting can call you into your own inner time.
The exhibition settles right beside that unexpected encounter, that inexplicable sense of recognition.
