Layers of Time: Clémentine Bruno Between Painting and Memory

A rarefied atmosphere, poised between the visible and the intuited, envelops Spectres in Pentimento, Clémentine Bruno’s new solo exhibition at Tabula Rasa Gallery. The Franco-British artist returns to painting to probe its deepest layers - material, historical, symbolic - evoking presences that inhabit both time and matter. The concept of pentimento, understood as the visible trace of pictorial revisions over time, becomes both poetic and technical key, opening a dialogue with tradition without ever yielding to it. Bruno works on wooden panels using gesso and animal glue - ancient techniques employed to question the very function of painting today. Her small, secular icons resist quick consumption - they demand closeness, attention, silence.
This is not nostalgia, but critical tension - a summoning of history’s spectres to restore depth to the present. A pictorial gesture that becomes a philosophical act.