A tear cannot be held. It emerges, crosses the face, and disappears. Crying is a fragile moment: almost as soon as it exists, it is gone. How can one preserve the instant in which a face is transformed by grief? How can one hold onto what, by its very nature, flows away and dissolves?

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These questions gave rise to Bake Your Pain, an ongoing body of work that Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos has developed since 2023 following the death of her father. Each time she cries, she sculpts a mask in bread—not to reproduce her own features, but to imagine the face shaped by mourning at that precise moment. Tears erase identity. The contours dissolve until swollen eyes become the dominant feature, transforming the face into a threshold through which grief becomes visible.

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Bread is the material of this gesture. Kneading, shaping and baking transform what is fleeting into something that can endure. In English, pain means suffering; in French, pain means bread. This double meaning lies at the heart of the project: an everyday material becomes the vessel of an intimate experience, preserving what would otherwise disappear. Repeated over time, this ritual has accumulated traces. The masks have multiplied without ever becoming the same, gradually giving rise to a wider body of work in which grief unfolds across bodies, objects, time and space.

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Presented in dialogue with the work of Valérie Giovanni, Veille sur elles brings together four interconnected series, unfolding across two complementary spaces

 

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Room 1

The first room explores grief as a field of tensions and invisible forces. Rather than representing loss itself, the works ask how its weight is carried, shared and sustained.

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Θρῆνος approaches mourning as a collective structure of tensions. Through a minimal system of threads, pulleys and suspended masses, grief appears not as a private emotion but as a weight continually redistributed between bodies. The installation proposes mourning as an unstable equilibrium in which no force exists in isolation.

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Lacrimal Architecture extends these tensions into space itself. Threads emerging from bread masks become lines of force, constructing an architecture held together by balance, gravity and interdependence. Here, tears cease to be traces left upon the face and become the structural elements of an invisible architecture.

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Room 2

The second room turns toward the world that follows disappearance. Rather than focusing on the event of death, the works examine the transformations it leaves behind: within matter, memory and lived experience.

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Life After Death investigates the material world of those who remain. Discarded objects from domesticity and work are assembled into fragile compositions where familiar relationships have quietly shifted. The series explores how loss reorganizes the everyday, giving rise to what the artist describes as a grammar of grief.

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Ὀδύσσεια approaches mourning as an irreversible journey. Inspired by Homer's invocation to the Muse and the Mediterranean tradition of the female mourner, the series asks what it means to inhabit a world after one of its possibilities has disappeared. Conceived as a sequence of autonomous "songs," each sculpture becomes a fragment of a larger odyssey, bearing witness not to death itself, but to the transformed world that follows it.

 

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Together, these works do not seek to represent grief as an emotion or death as an event. They explore the ways in which loss continues to shape bodies, matter, memory and space. Veille sur elle proposes mourning not as an ending, but as a process through which the world is continually reconfigured—its tensions redistributed, its materials transformed, and its meanings quietly rewritten.

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