Profusione – Book launch
T293 is pleased to present Isabella Ducrot: Profusione (Les Presses du Réel, 2025). The catalogue was conceived on the occasion of the artist’s 2024 exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon.
Isabella Ducrot: Profusione offers a comprehensive overview of the unique practice of the Italian artist. The catalogue documents seventy artworks—works on paper, fabric assemblages, and collages—produced between 2016 and 2024 and presented in the Dijon exhibition. Through essays and contributions by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim, Verena Lueken, Tobias Pils, Tschabalala Self, Andrea Viliani, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, the publication situates Ducrot’s recent work within a broader reflection on materiality, memory, and duration.
On the occasion of the catalogue launch, the exhibition will be accompanied by six new works on paper from Isabella Ducrot’s ongoing series Tendernesses, extending the dialogue opened by the publication into the present moment of her practice.
From the Latin tenere — to embrace, to sustain — derives also tender, meaning soft, fragile, easily undone. Isabella’s figures embody both conditions at once: they cling to one another even as their forms loosen, blur, and merge, as if the embrace itself were causing their boundaries to dissolve.
In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes describes tenderness as “an infinite, insatiable metonymy”: a language of gestures rather than words, a state that circulates quietly between bodies. A similar logic unfolds here. Figures return again and again — almost the same, yet never identical — as if repetition were not duplication but transformation.
Bodies seem to touch by being touched, to wet one another, as if contact were never one-sided but a continuous exchange. Forms let themselves be crossed and absorbed, blending like clouds or washes of water spreading across the surface. In Ducrot’s images, closeness never implies possession: forms lean toward one another, overlap, soften, and gradually dissolve, as if contact were something provisional, shared, and reciprocal.
Echoing what Lisa Robertson calls form as a continuous learning process — something that takes shape by moving across surfaces and between bodies — Ducrot’s silhouettes seem to remain open, mutable, in the act of becoming. Eyes are often closed, tensions released; colour spreads lightly, like breath or vapour. What emerges is not a fixed composition but a soft choreography of presences.
Suspended between embrace and dispersal, the Tendernesses inhabit a space where touch becomes atmosphere, and where intimacy is understood as a shared, porous condition.
Isabella Ducrot: Profusione offers a comprehensive overview of the unique practice of the Italian artist. The catalogue documents seventy artworks—works on paper, fabric assemblages, and collages—produced between 2016 and 2024 and presented in the Dijon exhibition. Through essays and contributions by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim, Verena Lueken, Tobias Pils, Tschabalala Self, Andrea Viliani, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, the publication situates Ducrot’s recent work within a broader reflection on materiality, memory, and duration.
On the occasion of the catalogue launch, the exhibition will be accompanied by six new works on paper from Isabella Ducrot’s ongoing series Tendernesses, extending the dialogue opened by the publication into the present moment of her practice.
From the Latin tenere — to embrace, to sustain — derives also tender, meaning soft, fragile, easily undone. Isabella’s figures embody both conditions at once: they cling to one another even as their forms loosen, blur, and merge, as if the embrace itself were causing their boundaries to dissolve.
In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes describes tenderness as “an infinite, insatiable metonymy”: a language of gestures rather than words, a state that circulates quietly between bodies. A similar logic unfolds here. Figures return again and again — almost the same, yet never identical — as if repetition were not duplication but transformation.
Bodies seem to touch by being touched, to wet one another, as if contact were never one-sided but a continuous exchange. Forms let themselves be crossed and absorbed, blending like clouds or washes of water spreading across the surface. In Ducrot’s images, closeness never implies possession: forms lean toward one another, overlap, soften, and gradually dissolve, as if contact were something provisional, shared, and reciprocal.
Echoing what Lisa Robertson calls form as a continuous learning process — something that takes shape by moving across surfaces and between bodies — Ducrot’s silhouettes seem to remain open, mutable, in the act of becoming. Eyes are often closed, tensions released; colour spreads lightly, like breath or vapour. What emerges is not a fixed composition but a soft choreography of presences.
Suspended between embrace and dispersal, the Tendernesses inhabit a space where touch becomes atmosphere, and where intimacy is understood as a shared, porous condition.
