IN YOUR EYES, I SAW THE REFLECTION OF GOLD AND DEATH
by
Jorge Canete

with a musical composition by Priscille Oehninger
April 2026 - August 2026

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In March 1476, after the failure of the negotiations in Neuchâtel, Charles the Bold marches on Grandson. The Bernese garrison of the castle is drowned or hanged. A few days later, facing the Confederate troops, the Burgundian army collapses in panic and flight. The camp is abandoned. Gold, tapestries, jewels: an immense treasure remains, scattered across the ground. On this field, the dead and the radiant coexist. And above them, the crows.

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The exhibition is born from this vantage point. Not that of the victors nor the vanquished, but that of the crows. From the sky, they see everything at once: abandoned bodies, scattered wealth, the ephemeral and the precious fused within a single vision. This gaze does not judge. It connects. As psychopomp figures crossing mythologies, they accompany passages, bind what has been separated, and remind us that every ending is also a threshold.

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The works presented here do not recount the event. They probe its resonance and the silent question it still poses: that of destiny. Why did this man, that morning, rise only to die? Why did another survive, his hands filled with gold he had not sought? What is at stake is not merely historical. It is a more ancient structure, almost archaic: the coexistence of opposites, and the enigma of what places us within them. Gold and death. Light and shadow. Value and loss.

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This tension is not to be resolved. It is the very place of transformation. What is denied, repressed, held outside the gaze never truly disappears; it acts in silence and resurfaces where we least expect it. The battlefield thus becomes an image of the psyche: a space where what shines and what is destroyed coexist, inseparable.

Photographs, paintings, installations, and texts—some carried by the voice of Manuela Salvi—emerge like a memory rising to the surface.

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From June onwards, a ritual installation accompanied by a musical creation by Priscille Oehninger will extend this journey: a space to inhabit, where the gaze becomes gesture and questions destiny.

The exhibition is not a reconstruction. It opens a field of perception—a space where History ceases to be distant and becomes interior. And where each of us is faced with this unfathomable question: what do we do with what, within us, carries both brilliance and night?

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Biography

Awarded the prize for Best International Designer in 2014, Jorge Cañete is a Swiss multidisciplinary artist whose practice brings together installation, text, image, and ritual.

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His trajectory unfolds as three lives: the first in Switzerland and internationally as an executive in the luxury industry—particularly in watchmaking—where he earned an Executive MBA (Business School Lausanne, 2003), shaping his sense of time and precision; the second oriented toward space, with a degree in Interior Design (London Metropolitan University, 2003–2005) and numerous international awards; and the third devoted to art, gathering these experiences into a single breath, where spatial composition becomes language and his works become contemporary sanctuaries.

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His creations are conceived as crossings, composed of thresholds, proportions, symbols, and silence. They take the form of sacred spaces where memory, absence, and metamorphosis become active presences, carried by a restrained yet powerful grammar of signs.

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At the heart of this practice unfold ritual and evolving installations. The work transforms through the passage and participation of those who enter, allowing action to become reflection and commitment. In return, a talisman is offered as a gesture of gratitude, extending the experience beyond the exhibition space—a trace to be carried forward.