Augusta Lardy Micheli: Vol de nuit

Text by: Elie de Gourcuff

On a pale autumn afternoon, when the day wavered between rain and silence, I met Augusta Lardy Micheli near the Palais-Royal so she could unfold what she envisioned for her next exhibition, in Vienna. Our conversation drifted less toward the works themselves than toward life—toward what unravels and reassembles, toward beauty that is sometimes forged in fury, toward the challenges that can define us, through pain or joy.

As the conversation progressed, I sensed that something was taking shape in Augusta’s mind… The works were coming together, first as words in the air, then — hours or days later — as gestures capturing images. This slow shift from words to paint was already sketching the bones of the exhibition.

This intellectual process revolved around the idea of falling.

A few days later, when I discovered the first paintings, I understood that Augusta had not considered falling as an accident or an end, but rather as a contemplative experience in which she could lose herself, so as to give fuller voice to her feelings.

What falls is not always lost: in Augusta’s hands, falling becomes a moment, and a transition. With her brushes, she seems to show us this threshold that was revealed to her, not in turmoil, but in the silence of vertigo, in a moment of calm before the storm breaks. Her paintings do not recount the fall: they extend it, holding onto its vibration.

Where others would seek to grasp, Augusta consents to let go, to embrace the awareness of movement that Henri Michaux expressed. She paints that suspended moment when everything shifts, when everything is in motion and, paradoxically, everything is revealed. In Cave of quietude, she makes us fall into a cave where the rock is made of oil and introspection becomes possible. In the artist’s shifting surfaces, matter becomes breath, imbalance becomes gaze. Falling is not refusing. It is a threshold, a moment turning movement into light.

To paint the fall is to accept to surrender to it. Augusta Lardy Micheli’s works arise from a kind of delicate brushing: they advance through layers, erasures, overflowings.

The gesture does not proclaim—it searches. Each trace seems to hold the very moment when form is on the verge of dissolving. It is not a painting of the fall, but one in fall, letting itself slip into the material and feel its own gravity before regaining momentum.

From that oscillation between weight and grace emerges both tension and resolution: pain and gentleness coexist; loss and presence merge.

In this continuous falling, something becomes clear— perhaps a way of being in the world, lucid and vulnerable, aware that beauty exists only at the trembling edge of imbalance.

• Elie de Gourcuff

Augusta Lardy Micheli, born in 1994 in Geneva, is a Swiss artist. She holds a degree in Philosophy from King’s College London and a Fine Arts degree from the City and Guilds of London Art School. She was awarded the Freelands Foundation Painting Prize in 2021. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Madrid (Galería Belmonte), Paris (Galerie DS), and Mexico City (Karen Huber). This year, she presented her first solo institutional show at the Musée des Beaux Arts le Locle, Switzerland.