Although the square as a geometric form had been used to derive the proportions of the Golden Ratio as early as Ancient Egypt and Classical Antiquity, it acquired its metric significance only at the end of the seventeenth century. In his An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, the English philosopher and linguist John Wilkins proposed the idea of a “universal measure” — a decimal unit based on a natural phenomenon. A century later, in 1790, inspired by the ideas of the French Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot, the French National Assembly adopted a decree initiating the reform of weights and measures. The task was entrusted to a special commission of the Paris Academy of Sciences led by the engineer and mathematician Jean-Charles de Borda. De Borda proposed defining the new unit as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator measured along the meridian passing through Paris. Thus, the project inevitably engages with the notions of “northernness” and the “North” as experiences of emptiness and boundlessness, reflected in the concept of Zero-Space.

When the Law Introducing the Metric System was enacted in France on April 7, 1795, the newly defined unit received the designation “the true and definitive metre.” Severin Infante presents his own interpretation of this primary foundation — the true and definitive metre.

The organization of the exhibition space is based on the metric sequence, one of the fundamental compositional principles of architecture, founded upon the regular repetition of identical elements at equal intervals. In this project, the metre emerges from Zero-Space, originating from a primary sign on the plane. Traversing the bends and contours of the galleries, it ultimately regains its strict metric resonance: metres become beats amid pauses.

The materiality of the artworks is disrupted through the incorporation of light elements, creating the effect of shimmering objects that seem to have lost their physical plane. Geometric abstractions, photographic and painted landscapes, and textual compositions intermingle within a kaleidoscope formed by identical modules. They fill the gallery walls like pixels, where dense clusters alternate with voids. Arranged along two perpendicular axes, the repetition of modules generates the sensation of a universal inner pulse. Zero-Space is achieved through the deliberate dissolution — the “veiling” — of all visual points of orientation: line and plane alike. Black square metres of pause between the works hover within the space as an absolute metaphor for artworks not yet created, or perhaps already gone.

Curator: Irina Gorlova