Belonging to different generations, Ann Veronica Janssens and Aurélie Godard have a shared interest in natural and extraordinary phenomena. The exhibition includes many pieces being shown for the first time, some of which were created during a residency on the Isle of Ouessant in Brittany. At CRAC Alsace, the artists’ works are blended in a trail whose bearings pitch and roll.

With her light-based installations, surreal films, and reflective or diaphanous surfaces, Ann Veronica Janssens does not so much produce forms as engage with the sensory experience of reality. Her propositions—simple, fragile or ephemeral—test our perception, memory and representations.

In Aurélie Godard’s work, form results from a negotiation between intent and accident. Driftwood is recycled into domestic furniture; random paint stains are carefully cut away and reworked; and balls are covered in paint whose colour varies with the intensity of the light. The forms thus redeployed urge the imaginative realm to take over from our sensations. Poised between balance and suspense, the artists’ works hold a subtle conversation. Playing with the “genius of the venue” (floor, wall, angles, light variations), they transform the exhibition spaces into a laboratory of sense-engaging and contemplative experiences. This exhibition was devised in close collaboration with Le Quartier art centre in Quimper, Brittany, where a first version was staged in late 2010.

Ann Veronica Janssens, born in 1956 in Folkestone, England, is a Belgian artist who lives and works in Brussels. She has achieved international recognition, notably for her installations, which immerse the public in artificial coloured fogs that challenge our habits with regard to perception and orientation, and other works that play with the parameters of light.

Aurélie Godard, was born in Rennes in 1979. She attended École des beaux-arts de Paris (ENSBA) from 2001, after taking a national diploma in visual arts (DNAP) at Villa Arson, Nice. In the same year, she took part in the group exhibition 432 km at École des beaux-arts de Lyon; and, in 2004, she showed work in the exhibition Valse at Musée Zadkine with Paris-based studio P2F. Since 2008, she has contributed to many French exhibitions, and is starting to show her art at foreign venues—including a recent show at Wiels, Brussels.