PORTRAIT PRESUME - Variation of PORTRAIT PRESUME DE GABRIELLE D ESTREES by ANONYMOUS

Born in 1976 and based in Brussels, Natacha Mercier is an artist who works across a range of media, including painting, photography, video, and performance. Her practice explores the limits of vision, playing with the thresholds between the visible and the invisible. Her approach is characterized by the use of techniques that blur and layer paint, creating images that gradually emerge and invite the viewer to sustained and attentive looking.

With the Vasistas? series presented here, she turns her attention to works that, throughout the history of art, have been censored, obscured, prohibited, or concealed. These pictorial fragments, like small apertures, offer fleeting glimpses—narrow passages into an imaginary realm charged with absence and memory. By questioning what has been withdrawn from view, Natacha Mercier invites the viewer to consider art history not as a stable narrative, but as a field traversed by gaps and silences.

“While Natacha Mercier’s work explicitly refers to the history of art, and in particular to the Western pictorial tradition, it does so in order to more effectively question the body in the digital age. Through techniques of partial erasure of the subject, the artist renders the body visible in its most intimate aspects. Rather than revealing, Natacha Mercier suggests, offering us the possibility of passing through the veil of images of the body and its prohibitions. The works in the Vasistas? series aim to censor in order to better exhibit, to veil in order to more effectively undermine the censorship of the visible.”
Text by Jérôme Carrié, Exhibition Curator at CIAM, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France)