REMAINS

For the 15th anniversary of Berlin Art Week, Fabien Dettori returns to Galerie GH36 for his tenth exhibition in Berlin. REMAINS is curated by Mario Bermel, who also organized Dettori's first exhibition in Germany. The encounter creates a rare curatorial arc: the person who first introduced the work to a German audience now returns to a practice profoundly transformed since that inaugural exhibition.

REMAINS brings together new works created specifically for Berlin with selected pieces from Dettori's recent exhibition in Venice, presented during the Biennale. Rather than functioning as a retrospective, the exhibition places distinct moments of the artist's recent practice in dialogue, revealing continuity through transformation.

The exhibition moves between still lifes and intimate portraits, including nudes. Both genres draw on the legacy of the great painters of art history: chiaroscuro, the vulnerability of the body, the symbolic charge of objects, and the shifting boundary between appearance and disappearance. Dettori does not quote this history directly. He treats it as a visual memory to be absorbed, displaced and reactivated.

"I photograph an authentic moment, a sincere emotion. Then I move away from that reality, toward interpretation and pure emotion, by transforming the photograph through painting."

This movement from the recorded moment toward interpretation is central to Dettori's practice. Photography is the origin, never the destination. Through paint, pigment, varnish, gold leaf and material interventions, the image progressively separates from its documentary source. A specific body, gesture or object becomes memory, sensation and residue.

In certain works, fracture itself becomes a constructive element. Gold does not embellish the image; it marks the place where something has been broken, altered or repaired. The gesture recalls kintsugi, yet here repair becomes emotional and pictorial as much as material: the wound is not concealed, but made visible as part of the work's identity.

The title REMAINS finds a particular resonance in Berlin. Few cities make the coexistence of rupture, erasure, reconstruction and historical persistence so visible. Dettori's images operate in a similar register. They retain traces of what was there while refusing the fiction of an intact past.

In this sense, REMAINS is less about preservation than persistence: what survives after the image, the memory and the material have all been transformed. What remains is not what escaped change, but what change could not erase.

Programme: Thursday 10 September, opening reception from 6 pm. Friday 11 September, artist talk and performance, 7 pm. Saturday 12 September, The Venice Biennale, Aperol Spritz, 7 pm. Sunday 13 September, The French Café Croissant, from 11 am.