EXPOSITION “What concerns us” D’Hilario isola
Exposition What concerns us d’Hilary ISOLA
Exhibition of 14 February to 14 Youri Cayron's creative documentary focuses on working-class memory and the history of the Tanneries de Barjols and mixes archive images and images 2026
The Châteauvert Contemporary Art Center of the Provence Verte Agglomeration is pleased to present the personal exhibition of the Italian artist Hilario Isola, who lives and works between Turin and Bagnolo. Titled What concerns us, this exhibition brings together for the first time a set of works that, comparisons, compose a unique gallery of portraits within his practice. Some pieces are from existing series — I Mani, In Philosophy, The Scientists, Aruspice — while others were specially designed for the exhibition, in resonance with the agricultural context, natural and historical of Provence Verte. This dialogue between old and new works reveals an underground line of force in the artist's work : the face as a threshold, as a sensitive interface between what we see and what looks at us.
What looks at us presents itself to us in chiaroscuro, Hilario Isola composes a new gallery here, not just portraits, but also unassignable figures, of hidden faces, fragmentary appearances : the works are not given immediately, they stand on the edge of the visible, in a regime of shadow and wakefulness, the exhibition is in a way constructed as a theater of the reversibility of the gaze : the works displayed here do not seek recognition, but the attention. They do not appear, they look.
By choosing to title the exhibition after the title of Georges Didi-Huberman’s essay (What we see, what concerns us, 1992), Isola immediately creates tension. It is no longer simply a matter of seeing – but of knowing oneself seen. To abandon the illusion of a sovereign gaze, to enter into a dialectic where the image is no longer an object to be captured, but a subject to meet. As in the Platonic allegory of the cave, the visible is here a matter of projection, of movement, of partial revelation. What we take for enlightened forms may still be a shadow. And what seems to be only a shadow is perhaps what, most deeply, concerns us.
Through this journey, Hilario Isola does not propose an exhibition of portraits, but an experience of the displaced gaze. An experience where the face shape becomes an interface — between memory and forgetting, matter and spirit, gesture and image. What we see, ici, does not give itself straight away. What concerns us, on the other hand, persists. Ici, the apparition moves, widens, diversifies. The look is not only archaeological : it becomes ethical, poetic, policy. It covers the question of landscape, of the ritual, of technology, memory and loss.
Chez Hilario Isola, the face is always what looks at us. And that look — discreet, latent, persistent — forces us to see differently.
His works are never born from a spectacular gesture, but for a long time. It is a work of deposit, slow presence, gentle transformation of materials. They activate an ecology of attention. They welcome the dust, the light, mold, the breath, the void. There is always, in his rooms, a threshold to cross — not just spatial or optical, but sensitive. We must agree to slow down, to move its axis, to abandon oneself to the index rather than the sign. It’s an art of approach, who does not seek to produce images, but to reveal the conditions of appearance.
We could say, with Emanuele Coccia, that these works prolong the living. They do not imitate nature, they are a continuity. The agricultural net, the vine, the branch, bauxite fungus or dust are not materials “inspiring” : they are co-authors. They work with the artist, they act on the form, they also watch. Each work is the place of porosity – between body and space, between human and plant, between ritual and accident. This is how it is woven, through this exhibition, a form of cosmopolitics of the gaze : a world where seeing means being affected.
What concerns us does not ask us to interpret. She invites us to experience. To stand in an expanded presence — where faces do not speak, but watch.
About the artist
No and 1976 in Turin, Hilario Isola lives and works between Italy and France. Artist and farmer, he has been developing since the beginning of the years 2000 a sensitive and conceptual work nourished by the forms of nature, artisanal gestures and slow transformation phenomena. His work has been presented in numerous institutions in Europe and internationally, notably at the NMNM – New National Museum of Monaco, at MUCEM (Marseille), at Friche Belle de Mai, at Art in General and Artists Space (New York), at the SculptureCenter (NY), at the CCA of Montreal, at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation (Turin), at the Bolzano Museum, at the David Roberts Art Foundation (London) or at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice).
Commissioner's Office : Véronique Collard-Bovy
This exhibition was made possible by the support of the Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Ministry of Culture and Southern Region.
The work Sole Spento was produced by AMBULO, artistic and museum center of Digne-les-bains – Contemporary art center of national interest.