La Madeleine de Proust

25 Nov 2025-16 Jan 2026

Jon Ridge, Rhyme and Reason, 2025, Acrylic on canvas

Overview

An exhibition of contemporary painting inspired by the involuntary memory of Proust's madeleine.

"...the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself... Seek? More than that: create."

At the heart of this exhibition lies a moment - fleeting, sensory, and transformative - famously captured in Marcel Proust’s recollection of tasting a crumb of madeleine dipped in herbal tea. The passage has become emblematic of involuntary memory: a sudden, inexplicable access to a hidden, interior world of significance that transcends time, logic, and the conscious mind.

The artists in this exhibition recognise that such moments of revelation defy memory, because they are fundamental to the process of making art. Like Proust’s narrator, they understand that the catalyst for creation often lies not in intention or intellect, but in accident - a colour placed instinctively, a brushstroke laid without plan, a surface reacting unexpectedly. The artwork emerges not through mastery alone, but through surrender to the unknown, the intuitive, the forgotten.

Philip Guston once suggested that painting is only truly possible when all influences - teachers, history, friends, even the artist’s own ego - have left the studio. What can then occur in that solitude is not an assertion of self but its absence: a state outside time, where thinking is suspended and creation may happen. It is less an act of will than of release of self into a space where something deeper can emerge.

The title of the exhibition is taken from this moment of revelation, pointing to a process that is uncertain, fragmented, and ongoing. The artists here do not seek to illustrate Proust, nor to define the elusive. Instead, they work in the quotidian, never knowing when something will trigger and release what lies hidden within - something intangible, wild and free. It cannot be held. It’s come across in the sudden intimacy of a remembered texture, the emotional charge of a form whose origin is unknown, the quiet authority of something glimpsed but not fully grasped.

In bringing these works together, La Madeleine de Proust is an invitation into that same fragile space of uncanny recognition. Just as a taste can open the past, so too a painting can spark an unforeseen connection, carrying one beyond explanation into the realm of experiencing. Revelation is there, in that moment of surprise.

https://website-artlogicwebsite1575.artlogic.net/exhibitions/26-la-madeleine-de-proust-group-show/overview/

Artists

Press

La Madeleine de Proust press release
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