There is a particular kind of courage in making work that refuses to look away. Not the heroic kind, but the quiet, stubborn, almost laughable courage of continuing, of just picking up the brush or chisel again, and doodling, carving, through the void. In the group exhibition “A Very Good Dinner Party” ten artists, Thomas Bils, Mirela Cabral, Luiza Crosman, Pauline d’Andigné, Thalita Hamaoui, Roy Mordechay, Jeehye Song, Anne-Cécile Surga, Sophie Ullrich and Aleza Zheng, share this disposition. Their works do not resolve the fundamental tension between human longing and the world's indifference; they inhabit it, with passion, lucidity, and no small amount of humor.

French philosopher, Albert Camus, proposed that the absurd is born in the confrontation between our need for clarity and the world's unreasonable silence. The response he championed was not despair, but revolt— a joyful, clear-eyed insistence on living fully in spite of it all. These paintings and sculptures are such acts of rebellion. True doodler's doodlings, and forms, infused with irony and tenderness. They articulate a longing for unmediated connection, be it to nature, to earth, to matter, to one another, while never pretending such connection comes without friction.

Shown in tandem, these works do not offer consolation. Between the absurd question and the equally absurd joy of asking it again, they offer something rarer: solidarity in the face of the unanswerable. Welcome to the dinner party, where the absurd is a shared condition.

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