Carole Vanderlinden evoked ancient Egypt from the start of our discussions about her project at MINERVE, where one curatorial focus is the sun’s trajectory, cyclical temporality, and the everyday. 

The figure of Nout, the Egyptian goddess, quickly emerged as central. Nout embodies the celestial vault in Egyptian cosmology: she swallows the sun each evening only to rebirth it at dawn. The Egyptians depicted her as a nude woman, her body serving as the sun’s nocturnal passage. She functions both as a narrative motif and a structural principle, a way of conceiving the image as transition and form as duration.

To deepen this dialogue, Vanderlinden proposed inviting Elisabeth Van Caelenberge, an art historian and Egyptologist, as co-curator. The selection of drawings spans both new and older works by the artist, chosen for their formal and symbolic resonances with Egyptian art. Amid the apparent heterogeneity of her oeuvre, certain permanent features surface: frontality, gestural economy, flattened perspectives, the primacy of contour, abstract decorative motifs, human figures, everyday objects, and cosmic patterns.

The collection of works forms a rhythmic, structured field where each fragment engages with the cosmos, the customary, and the memory of forms. This rhythmic arrangement of the artworks also mirrors the artist’s studio practice, which unfolds in two phases: intimate drawings in a confined space, followed by paintings in a more expansive setting. The constant interplay between drawing, collage, assemblage, and painting - each threaded into the next, as a patchwork in perpetual making - proved decisive for this exhibition.

Alongside the installation, Vanderlinden exposes her notebooks for the first time. Shown exclusively at MINERVE, these notebooks reveal traces of her readings (novels, history books, philosophical essays) and art historical references, visual and conceptual research on ethnicities, customs, craftsmanship, music… and the serendipitous discoveries of daily life. “These notebooks are my memory, a space where all mixtures and confrontations are allowed without fear of judgement. They are a private realm where drawing, pasting, cutting, layering, and tinkering bring me a primal but essential joy in my practice. They are a great comfort to me.” (Carole Vanderlinden)

At MINERVE, natural light and the sun’s path become active materials, transforming the space throughout the day and across seasons. Echoing Egyptian thought, where the cosmic is inscribed in the flow of life, Carole Vanderlinden’s exhibition merges the symbolic and the pragmatic, celestial order and ordinary existence.

 Maud Salembier