Sorbonne Artgallery

December 1, 2025 to January 16, 2026

Aesthetic Modernity and Framing

Aesthetic modernity has often been associated with framing. It replaces the representation of objects with the definition of spaces. Baudelaire’s modern eye, sensitive to the fleeting, captures the sway of a garland or the clouds drifting across the sky. It places a window onto reality in order to cut out a movement. Anne Deleporte also looks at clouds, but to discern lightning within them. She follows their flashes and gathers their passages of light. The luminous phenomenon—whether coming from the sky or from the revelation of color—lies at the heart of her work.

Revealed Papers

In New York, in Queens, where old printing presses still operate, Anne Deleporte collects papers and newspapers, fascinated by the first flows that precede the appearance of typographic characters. This moment of liquid ink spreading across paper makes colors vibrate and reveals lights and lines that later disappear into the information delivered to readers. The artist preserves this fleeting passage by taking the first proofs, often failed prints, where the ink has not yet properly settled into words.

All colors are present, available like a shifting palette in which chance and accident—relegated to the newspaper’s waste—become phenomenal moments. Before the world’s “news,” flashes have circulated across the paper, which Anne Deleporte maintains in this state of concealment and revelation: not yet readable, writing lies in wait there in the form of lightning.

The scriptible has disappeared—or rather, these sheets have been inked and encoded by a phenomenon that escapes reading and enters the realm of a paradoxical spectacle: not the display of the inscribable, but the presentation of a luminous intensity that chops, cuts, and streaks across juxtaposed sheets. The artist assembles this deposit and exhibits it in sequences of striated spaces.

Lightning and Destiny

These linear, colorful traces are seen by Anne Deleporte as lightning bolts that have struck through the fabric of paper. In her artistic practice, they resonate with the objects she sculpts and calls “thunderstones”—a three-dimensional concretion of lightning. Born of thunder, these mythical stones have been interpreted in many ways since antiquity, believed to ward off misfortune.

Such fascination with lightning stems from the fact that Anne Deleporte survived being struck by it, an event that made her a “lightning-struck one.” The fulminating energy, when lightning hits a body, completely hollows out the person struck and left her voiceless for months. Later, it gave her a culture of storms and a form of magnetism that she now detects in passages of light. Without yielding to spiritualism, she cannot avoid questioning this abduction by the sky—why she was chosen to receive lightning and to bear witness to it.

By exhibiting her sheets crossed by lines, she transforms chance into necessity, like a destiny unfolding from her electrified body to the slashed papers. A distracted eye might see beautiful abstract paintings in these colored spaces; yet they instead reveal trails of fire, electromagnetic fields, shimmering glows—red, blue, or green—frantically seeking a point of discharge. Their anarchy only intensifies their speed and urgency.

Art history bears witness to certain artists’ fascination with lightning. Georgia O’Keeffe painted it; Walter De Maria sought to provoke it with his lightning fields in New Mexico. “Anne the Lightning” carries it within her. She knows too well the danger of attracting it to approach it lightly, yet her body and mind remain bound to its presence. She detects its intense traces and shows them to us after they have emerged from the clouds. Anne Deleporte’s flashes arise from her kinship with what once passed through her: she knows how to see intensities.

Silent Lightning

Experience and the artist’s eye grant the gift of recognizing an electrical charge, capturing it, and communicating its memory—like a star whose luminous trail remains long after it has vanished. In the papers whose cutouts she exhibits at the Sorbonne Art Gallery, Anne Deleporte creates a serial effect for these traces, which seem to follow lines, as if lightning had leaked from one sheet to another. She does not settle for an image that passively illuminates the viewer; instead, she composes rhythms that generate pulsation and speed, like beats of energy.

In a neo-classical setting, these flashes instill an unexpected sense of lightning. From her Queens studio, where she collected her papers and inks, the lightning bearer transports thunder to Paris-Sorbonne, into this space created by Yann Toma, an artist also connected to luminous energies. One might fear short circuits in the buildings of this august university frequented by jurists and economists.

Scattering this gallery—which has regained its original meaning as a passageway—Anne Deleporte’s works, without captions, quietly introduce lightning. Her flashes, conducive to the charging and discharging of the gaze, allow us to experience the fulgurations of thunder directly on a sheet of paper.

François Noudelmann