But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. It had at once made the vicissitudes of life indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way as love, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize and define it?

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first; a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion has almost lost its virtue. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only, in all probability, keep on repeating indefinitely, with a gradually diminishing intensity, the same testimony which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to request it again from it and find it, intact, at my disposal, a little later on, for a final enlightenment.

I put down the cup and turn to my mind. It is for the mind to discover the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is faced with something which has not yet been, which it alone can make real, and which it alone can bring into its light.

Marcel Proust (translated by Scott Moncrief)

La Madeleine de Proust
An exhibition of contemporary painting inspired by the involuntary memory of Proust's madeleine

"...the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself... Seek? More than that: create."
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

At the heart of this exhibition lies a moment - fleeting, sensory, and transformative - famously captured in Marcel Proust’s recollection of tasting a crumb of madeleine dipped in herbal tea. The passage has become emblematic of involuntary memory: a sudden, inexplicable access to a hidden, interior world of significance that transcends time, logic, and the conscious mind.

The artists in this exhibition recognise that such moments of revelation defy memory, because they are fundamental to the process of making art. Like Proust’s narrator, they understand that the catalyst for creation often lies not in intention or intellect, but in accident - a colour placed instinctively, a brushstroke laid without plan, a surface reacting unexpectedly. The artwork emerges not through mastery alone, but through surrender to the unknown, the intuitive, the forgotten.

Philip Guston once suggested that painting is only truly possible when all influences - teachers, history, friends, even the artist’s own ego - have left the studio. What can then occur in that solitude is not an assertion of self but its absence: a state outside time, where thinking is suspended and creation may happen. It is less an act of will than of release of self into a space where something deeper can emerge.

The title of the exhibition is taken from this moment of revelation, pointing to a process that is uncertain, fragmented, and ongoing. The artists here do not seek to illustrate Proust, nor to define the elusive. Instead, they work in the quotidian, never knowing when something will trigger and release what lies hidden within - something intangible, wild and free. It cannot be held. It’s come across in the sudden intimacy of a remembered texture, the emotional charge of a form whose origin is unknown, the quiet authority of something glimpsed but not fully grasped.

In bringing these works together, La Madeleine de Proust is an invitation into that same fragile space of uncanny recognition. Just as a taste can open the past, so too a painting can spark an unforeseen connection, carrying one beyond explanation into the realm of experiencing. Revelation is there, in that moment of surprise.