Alzueta Gallery Paris is pleased to present The Past Remembers You as Memory, Liam Stevens’ first solo exhibition in Paris. Opening on April 7, the exhibition unfolds in two acts: the First Act, on view until April 29; and the Second Act, until May 23, each presenting a series of paintings that respond to one another in an echo. The full exhibition can be discovered at 8 Rue des Beaux-Arts, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Liam Stevens’ paintings emerge through time, slowly revealing traces of dialogue between presence and absence, stillness and motion, perception and recollection. The Past Remembers You as Memory aims to be a journey through these dualities.
First Act
For Stevens, memory is spatial. The duality between his life in London and his studio in the mountains of Okutama, Japan, sets in motion a continual exchange of impressions; two landscapes held in tension, each echoing through the other. The mountain’s mist, the river’s white noise, and the fleeting interplay of light across trees are carried back into the studio, re-emerging as inflections of form, light, and linear geometry. His paintings seed recollection: layered spaces in which lived experience and remembered sensation coexist.
Underlying these works is a meditation on pattern as a unifying condition. From crystalline to cellular, from thought to atmosphere, everything emerges through arrangements that give form to matter. Each mark acts as an independent point within a shared constellation: singular yet co-dependent, bound to an unseen rhythm.
Second Act
The second act presents a different atmospheric register of the same body of work. These shifts operate as echoes, with the second act carrying traces of the first. Meaning remains unfixed, emerging in the shared moment of perception, in a space where memory, anticipation, and awareness converge.
This order in flux resonates with the natural systems that inform the work: rainfall, ripples, the wind’s tremor across a surface, where repetition is never mechanical, but continuously alive with variation.
The evolution of Stevens’ practice reflects a movement toward organic rhythm. Earlier, defined pencil grids have given way to more fluid, rectilinear painted gestures; a language of iteration grounded in nature’s own processes.
Many of these works incorporate gold or silver pigments over raw jute. While conscious of their art-historical associations, Stevens employs these materials less as symbols than as carriers of light. They hover between the natural and the urban: sunlight scattered across the Tama River in Okutama, or the tungsten glow diffused through London’s windows at night.
Across both acts, Stevens’ paintings offer not representation, but resonance; like the trace of a place that remains long after you’ve left it, they are moments of memory made tangible.
© Text and Photo courtesy of Alzueta Gallery
