Claudia Comte
Lost in the Forest
OMR, 2025
Claudia Comte’s work is shaped by her engagement with material memory and the evolving relationship between the hand and technology. Her practice, spanning painting, sculpture, and immersive installations, explores ecological change, the transformation of natural forms, and the intersections between organic and digital structures. Grounded in a tactile sensibility, her work resonates with historical traditions of land art and minimalism while embracing a contemporary language of abstraction and environmental urgency.
For her exhibition Lost in the Forest, at OMR, Comte has created a large-scale installation that extends her inquiry into geological time, the fragility of human imprint, and the ecological forces that shape and destabilised the environments we inhabit. At its centre, twenty marble columns anchor the main gallery space in an imposing structured grid, their upright forms recalling both architectural order and the vertical density of a forest. Carved from four types of marble—two variations of white Carrara marble in different tones, Bardiglio in grey, and Marquina in black—the columns form a greyscale gradient that moves rhythmically through the space. Up close, fragments from Pablo Neruda’s Lost in the Forest, a poem that evokes the disorientation and intimacy of being lost in nature, it is revealed, are etched into each column, folding language into the deep time of stone. Delicate engravings of leaves also punctuate the marble, appearing as if caught in motion before being permanently fossilised into the surface.
Marble, shaped over millennia by intense geological pressure, operates in Comte’s work as both an archive of natural history and a marker of human intervention. Here, the columns are both monuments and signifiers of change, where memory and erosion entangle across human and geological time. Comte’s marble forest suggests a paradox: the endurance of stone against the fragility of language and memory.
Surrounding the columns are 9 paintings on canvas depicting root systems, made using Sequoia dust — collected remnants from Comte’s sculptural process and repurposed as pigment. Here, material becomes image: the repurposed dust imprinting its own history onto the surface. The branching forms recall both subterranean networks and the electrical paths of lightning, pointing to systems of connection, organic, energetic and unseen. These paintings carry the material memory of the sculptures, their surfaces holding the dust of the forms from which they came, as if root and branch had momentarily converged.
In the upstairs gallery, a contrasting spatial intervention unfolds: a carpeted floors and walls transition through a gradient of colour, moving from cool blues to warm yellows and reds. Scattered across the floor are 25 larger-than-life marble apples, based on hand-sculpted clay forms that were3D-scanned and carved in stone. The visible marks of the original clay are preserved in the marble, retaining the texture and immediacy of the hand. Alongside them, a solitary marble robin perches on a tree stump. These elements introduce a more speculative register—an evocation of the garden, of growth and entropy, and of the way objects accrue meaning over time. The apples become paradoxical symbols of both nourishment and petrification, drawing on the still-life tradition in European painting, where depictions of fruit served as metaphors for both abundance and decay.
This sense of reverie gives way in an adjoining room, where the carpet continues, but the tone shifts. Along the walls, a series of digital prints display black-and-white renderings of the exclamation HAHAHA, sourced from French, American, and Belgian comics. Each retains the graphic peculiarities of its origin—some scrawled, others bold and eruptive. Comte has long been drawn to comics for the way they animate reality, exaggerate movement, and use humour to expose uncomfortable truths. Here, HAHAHA becomes a visual trace of laughter as both release and rupture—cutting through the installation’s meditative register with a darker undercurrent. Often paired with explosions or disappearances in comic panels, this repeated utterance appears here as a fractured response to environmental crisis. Comte asks whether this rhythm of laughter, often used to soften violence or mask anxiety, desensitises us, or helps us face what we can’t quite articulate.
Lost in the Forest explores the impossibility of fully grasping the scales of time, whether geological, ecological, or human. Throughout the exhibition, time appears not as a linear progression but asan accumulation of marks, materials, and gestures. Comte’s gathering of elements—lines of poetry, Sequoia dust, engraved marble, and expanses of shifting colour and graphic utterances—creates an intensely rich environment where memory is not preserved intact but continually reconfigured. In the context of accelerating climate change, this overlapping of timescales highlight the instability of the natural world and the difficulty of locating oneself within it. The disorientation described in Neruda’s Lost in the Forest mirrors the experience of moving through the work: aplace where perception slows, and where past and present intermingle across registers of language, form, and matter. Just as the forest in Neruda’s text holds both concealment and revelation, Comte’s landscape refuses resolution—traces of the past emerge in shifting forms, embedded in the materials that shape our understanding of place and time.
