Etienne Chambaud Operator (Neon Complement), 2025

Etienne Chambaud's neon in the shape of an apostrophe is intended to conceptually alter the way a space and its components are considered. The blue neon blinks randomly throughout the gallery, its light extending to the outside.

Operators (Neon Complements) introduce a written layer of negation. Drawing on mathematical set theory—where the apostrophe denotes the complement of a set, representing all that it is not—these Operators reconfigure objects and spaces as their abstract counterparts. Just as in mathematics A' designates a set of all elements that are not in A, Chambaud's apostrophe neon then designates a negation. A Mirror, a Pillory or even the building of the gallery itself becomes, in turn, everything it excludes: all that it is not.