CLIO SZE TO

An echo never repeats a sound without transforming it. The time that separates it from its source subtly alters its form. Clio Sze To’s paintings seem to follow the same logic: ordinary images leave the world, pass through consciousness, and return transformed, carrying with them the traces of every surface they have encountered.

This exhibition marks a significant evolution in the artist’s practice. For many years, the city was observed from a fixed point of view: the window of her apartment in the Cité du Pont de Sèvres, which became a daily frame for contemplation and revealed the extent of her enduring fascination with its subject. «_Alongside the interest in discovering a Pompidou-era architectural ensemble from multiple angles, the work also becomes a construction of identity and memory_.»¹

Since then, Clio Sze To has left her family’s apartment in Pont de Sèvres and now wanders through the city.Gathering fleeting apparitions during her wanderings, she meticulously paints a hyperreal portrait of a fragmented, ever-changing Paris: a façade caught by passing light, a reflection in a shop window, the shadow of a tree along the banks of the Seine, but also a light bulb or a silent houseplant. Each motif generates another perspective, another subtle transformation of reality. Paris, the City of Light, is transfigured in much the same way that the Cité du Pont de Sèvres once was through the repeated observation of a single fixed viewpoint.

Some of these encounters are first held by photography before finding their way back into painting, as though the camera opened another window onto which the artist’s projections might settle. Between the world and the painting, the image passes through several states: it is experienced, recorded, forgotten, rediscovered, and reconstructed.

The recent shift to oil painting accompanies this transformation. Without abandoning the legacy of the traditional Chinese technique of watercolour on silk—which she now adapts to linen canvas—Clio Sze To explores the possibilities of glazing, transparency, and layered surfaces. Each painting retains the memory of her enduring fascination as much as that of the gaze from which it emerged.