Belgian artist Eva L’Hoest (born in Liège in 1991) is presenting a series of works produced specifically for “The Mindful Hand” exhibition at Casino Luxembourg. Through these works, she questions our perception of images, questioning the narrative--which is becoming less and less linear--and the process of producing images, which is now heavily dependent on digital tools and less and less produced by the hand.

As an introduction to the exhibition, visitors are introduced to a large-scale black sculpture in the form of a high relief. It is a sculpture produced using a 3D printer, and its motif is an image extracted from software that produces 3D images. “Digital tools allow us to distance ourselves from our environment, just as photography did when it was first created. They question our vision of our world,” explains L’Hoest. What starts out as a 3D image--and therefore a succession of codes--becomes, through the use of tools and transposition into space, a sculpture, a relief image whose scale has changed.

“Today, I believe that digital tools impose a feudal reign,” says the artist. “If you don’t master them, you can’t cross the drawbridge into the fortress.”

But for the visitor, perception is not obvious. One can make out the shapes in this “image box,” but it's impossible to make out the anthropomorphic forms correctly. One can’t be sure. The backlighting blinds the eye, making it impossible to grasp the volumes. The residual threads of material add a distinctive character to the work and guide the mind towards the physical act of making the sculpture, towards the motorised gesture of the 3D printer. It’s clear that the act of making is important, and raises questions about the place of the hand, of artistic practice, of craftsmanship. But the iconographic subject matter is beyond comprehension.

The object of study is the human being

Visitors are then invited to continue into the main room. Here, they are physically guided by a metal railing that accompanies both the body and the eye as they move through the room, leading to a series of boxes. These Skinner boxes, which are usually used in laboratories for observing animals, contain other high-reliefs, similar in their narrative device to what was presented earlier, but smaller, made of an alloy of bismuth and tin. The subject of observation here is not the animals, but the image and what it represents. “For artificial intelligence, man has become a subject of observation, an element from which it learns. We have become the laboratory subject,” says L’Hoest.

A series of four screens then show a film shot in the Casino’s spaces. “I wanted to turn the camera towards the building, to have a kind of intimacy with the space,” explains the artist. To achieve this, she filmed in 16mm in the empty spaces, without people. To the travelling images of the attic and cellars, she added digital inlays and a text by the poet Eva Mancuso, whose words, according to the artist, evoke “the female condition, the relationship with time and memory, the question of intimacy.”

Moving on, you come across another sculpture, a human figure with multiple arms and legs. This is in fact a volume version of a Ragdoll, the name given to the generic character used to compose crowds in virtual animations using image overlay. “Except that here, all the Ragdolls I\ve composed are superimposed on point ‘0’ of the image, the point at which the characters enter the image before being scattered across the landscape, wherever the creator wishes,” explains the artist. In a way, then, this is a behind-the-scenes image, a frozen moment of an intermediary stage that is supposed to evolve afterwards and not be a final result.

Finally, the last work presented is certainly the most spectacular: a kinetic device in which a blindfolded face emerges from a block. This carousel is inspired by the ancient zoetrope system, which uses the phenomenon of persistence of vision and the phi effect to produce a moving image. Around the carousel, a metal basket is a copy of the one at the Paris stock exchange in the 1960s, and a soundtrack plays the voices of traders. “This link with the stock market evokes how new technologies are also used to predict our future, can interfere with the financial markets through speculative analysis and thus shape a new truth, since the machine is not supposed to be wrong,” explains Vincent Crapon, co-curator of the exhibition with Stilbe Schroeder.

After this exhibition, one question remains: was it the right time to invite Eva L’Hoest for a solo exhibition? Shouldn’t her artistic path have been further developed before being exhibited so widely? The work is interesting and undeniably has aesthetic and intellectual qualities, but some of it lacks a little formal mastery. There are also a few confusions in the subject matter, which is too dense and multidirectional. However, the artist skilfully blends old practices (casting, high-relief sculpture, ronde-bosse, zoetrope) with new technologies (digital printers, image-creation software, artificial intelligence), their intermingling adding depth. There are also some awkward spatial arrangements: the path between Skinners boxes doesn't work, and why such a large projection for the film Main Station? The work is nevertheless very promising, but deserves to mature a little further.

The Mindful Hand, on display until 11 May, open starting Friday 31 January from 6pm.

This article was originally published in .