This Friday, March 28, 7:30pm - 9:00pm: Screening of “Toute une nuit” by Chantal Akerman (a 1982 Belgian-French film). [90-minute runtime.] Doors open at 7:15pm. Currently on view at the gallery: A Whole Night . Xiao He. March 8 - April 12, 2025. Debut solo exhibition. 4478 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016. (Contact Emily Reisig with any questions: gallery@reisigandtaylorcontemporary.com) _ _ This Friday, March 28, 7:30pm - 9:00pm, the gallery is screening Chantal Akerman’s film “Toute une nuit” (1982) or “A Whole Night” as part of Xiao He's ongoing solo exhibition. The title of this film is shared by both the exhibition and the final work completed in preparation for this solo show(… an end before a beginning). As with many of the pieces included in the exhibition, that painting initially draws from a cinematic still. But like all the other paintings, it steadily holds and releases this moment of looking, gazing, as the work turns through oily, layered lapses and elongated phases of recording, moving, forgetting, re-remembering—until I see the image returns to itself, cut from someone else’s dream. Most of the views in exhibited paintings appear interrupted and incomplete, partial or cropped: hunched figures, hints of objects, dangling lights falling through the frame; faces too close or too far. I can only see part of it because it’s still moving, still happening—a record that’s more of a reæl than a representation or copy. (But what’s happening is just between us.) Each surface splays at the brim of the (painting’s own) perspective, at the blindspots and edges. A looker watches myself seeing. A punctured motion (out of sight). A painting, painting itself painting. …. I see what’s so precious isn’t the painting, isn’t the object, isn’t the thing….  What’s so precious is the chance, the melancholic falling (into place): the timing. Vertigo. What’s so precious is that I see myself looking. That I’m exchanged. Or that I see myself looking as someone else, that my whole expanse runs along my gaze until it becomes somewhere else. (That there’s footage of me caught in the act.) What’s so precious is that I’m drawn to the light (so I can see). Suddenly but slowly the source of my life and the source of my longing align. An eclipse: because the light is too bright so it becomes a blindspot, swapping me for a moth: I think it’s the sun. (You think I’m the sun.) If there’s anything precious it’s all the distance of the double life that divides me from myself, so I only ever find what I want in pieces. So I only find needles made of haystacks. So I see myself strewn but only all the forgetting can keep all of the parts together. So I only know you because memory holds us far enough apart. Because at night everything that’s missing between us is what keeps us so close. Or as far away as a shadow from its source; where a body beams a hole where day becomes night against me. Tripling the two: | / Or, in the morning: when forgetting starts the memory of a dream. “All night I make night in me.” All night you make day in me. (Or, if I didn’t lack you I wouldn’t be nearby.) _ _ _ _ observations from the night When the moon tells us the sun is somewhere else, it shows me its face by turning away. Only the yellow blare of a lupine melancholia can tell the difference between who’s looking. A signal. Otherwise there’s only clockwork keeping count. There’s only turning toward and away. But the turning keeps going one direction, clockwise. (There’s a projected plane, a jutting-out.) 0. Or, during the day the sun is a hole: it’s too bright to be seen, to be looked-at directly. I turn away from the sun. All the light comes from nothing. (Zero.) 1. Or, during the night all the suns are punctured: it’s too dark to see anything, except what’s missing. The hole that was the sun surrounds me and I know that because it’s shadow lets me look over its boundary. Because I’m plucked from its center. I turn toward the night. (I turn toward where the light use to be.) All the light comes from nothing. (Infinity.) All this turning in the night. All this turning is the night. Or, “[…] All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone.          The noise of steps in the circle near this choleric light birthed from my insomnia. Steps of someone who no longer writhes, who no longer writes. All night someone holds back, then crosses the circle of bitter light.          All night I drown in your eyes become my eyes. All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing. […]”* _____________________ *Alejandra Pizarnik, "[All night I hear the noise of  water sobbing.]" from "The Galloping Hour: French Poems" (2018). Translated by Patricio Ferrari and Forrest Gander. __________________________________________ Image: Installation View/ Day. Positioned at gallery-rear. Oriented toward rear enclave. [Photography: ofstudio.]