Cécile Lempert’s works produce a cinematic world of ambiguities, shifting between the tender and loving to the violent, paranoid and eerie. Selecting imagery from a personal archive of film stills, family snapshots and borrowed details of European masters, Lempert’s first solo presentation with Efremidis draws together themes of intimate proximity and impassive distance. Cropped details of hands and fingers express moments of intimate or invasive touch, while close-ups of faces appear to mask a whirring interior world of private thought. 

A compelling and distinctive feature of Lempert’s paintings is her incorporation of a split-screen format. By placing two images side by side with only a subtle shift between them, the artist aims to depict a temporal “gap”; a fragile border between two states. With this compositional doubling, an uneasy fracture is introduced to the stillness and veracity of the painted image, staging the artist’s confrontation with the impossibility of truly capturing a fleeting presence.

The exhibition’s title is taken from a letter by philosopher Simone Weil, in which she laments the extraordinary vulnerability of human life: “Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling”. In Lempert’s paintings, this trembling fragility is figured through loose impressionistic strokes which alternate between chalky opacity and translucent washes, such that the corporeal warmth and presence of her subjects seem ready to dissolve at any moment. 

Take a simple word like ‘TESTER’, for example. Printed tiny inside a sticky oval and pasted on the lid of a plastic lipstick tube, it’s a humble and familiar invitation to temporary use – a non-committal experiment in the make-up aisle of your local DM. But to find this TESTER enlarged and emblazoned in slick blue acrylic, encased in the machine-cut precision of a wooden frame – familiarity becomes uneasy. Who or what is testing? Who or what is being tested? The door to narrative potential swings wide.