There is a foundational image in Sepand Danesh’s work: that of a departure that never closes, an airplane that takes off but seems never to land. Exile, then, is not a past event but a continuous state — an endless crossing, a suspension between two worlds. It is within this vertigo that the artist has built his visual language: a corner of a wall with neither floor nor ceiling, a bare space where nothing offers support except a small shelf populated with cubes, minimal forms that become fragments of memory, thought, or identity. In these scenes, the figures — writers, musicians, literary characters, or avatars of his own story — appear frozen in a mysterious moment, between appearance and disappearance. They embody an identity “built upon the very impossibility of defining itself.”
For La Traversée, Sepand Danesh pushes this reflection even further by making the tightrope walker the central metaphor of exile. For the exile, like the walker suspended in the void, moves forward in a state of constant imbalance: one foot in the forward motion, one foot in the past, torn between the land left behind and the one that never fully offers refuge. The tightrope walker becomes the image of an identity under tension, always being reshaped — “a transformation of instability into creative force”: the art of imbalance evoked by Évelyne Grossman, which runs through all of Danesh’s work.
The stripes, a banner of transgression and rupture according to Michel Pastoureau, reappear as visual interferences, recalling the violence of crossing from one world to another — lines of separation, visible or invisible boundaries. The cubes, meanwhile, proliferate as units of reconstruction — building blocks with which the artist rebuilds broken identities, as in Self-Portrait, where the self scatters and reforms around a fragile flame.
The exhibition thus becomes a crossing of tightrope-walking figures:
– those who wait in a space without horizon, like the two silhouettes in Waiting for Godot, suspended in an unresolved waiting, a metaphor for a time frozen between two states of belonging;
– those who carry an invisible weight, as in Quasi-Modo, where the burden takes the form of a green mass, perhaps memory, identity, or loss;
– those who reflect, double, and search for themselves, like the Bather who reassembles through the mirror, in a gesture of resistance and survival.
La Traversée is not a linear narrative, but a succession of precarious balances, suspended gestures, fragmentary presences. Exile appears not as a rupture, but as a trajectory: a wire stretched across the void, along which one must advance, step by step, with the awareness that balance — always to be regained — is already a form of victory.
In this journey that is both intimate and universal, Danesh turns the tightrope walker into a figure of creation as much as of survival. To walk on the wire is to invent one’s own geography, to transform imbalance into breath, and to make each oscillation an act of identity.
This new series, conceived as a passage, brings together characters who are themselves wandering — figures from literature, music, or art history, as well as doubles of the artist, all pixelated, fragmented, recomposed. The Tightrope Walker himself, already present in an earlier work, advances on a wire where each step seems made of decisions, memories, and hesitations. Here, he becomes the guide of the exhibition, the one who crosses for us these mental landscapes where exile is no longer only geographical but interior.
The crossing continues...
