With "Quelque chose a changé" ("Something Has Changed"), Lola Jay continues her pictorial exploration of memory, images and the ways in which we reconstruct our own past.
Exhibition: 28 October – 8 November 2026
Opening reception: Wednesday 28 October at 6 pm
Opening hours: Wednesday to Friday, 4 pm–7 pm, and weekends, 2 pm–6 pm
Closing event: Sunday 8 November at 5 pm
Trained in graphic design at CFP Arts in Geneva, followed by illustration at the École supérieure de bande dessinée et d’illustration, Lola Jay has developed an artistic practice at the intersection of painting and visual culture. After working extensively with graphite pencil, she turned to oil painting, introducing colour into a visual universe inspired by family archives, cinema, fashion, analogue photography and images collected from the Internet.
In Quelque chose a changé, Lola Jay focuses particularly on what we choose to preserve. A family photograph, a film scene, a found image or a personal memory can never be considered an entirely neutral record of the past. Photographing, framing, narrating or archiving already involves a process of selection: deciding what will remain visible, what will disappear and from which perspective an event will later be revisited.
The image thus becomes less a record of a particular moment than the starting point for its reconstruction. Through repeated recollection, memories shift, evolve and sometimes become indistinguishable from their representations.
This ambiguous relationship between personal and collective memory runs throughout Lola Jay's paintings. Her compositions, often drawing on the visual language of photography, isolate gestures, figures and fragments of everyday life. Seemingly ordinary events acquire a new sense of time through their transformation into painting: that of a suspended present, in which something remains even though the world to which the image once belonged has already changed.
The exhibition brings together oil paintings depicting members of the artist's family, studies inspired by cinema, found and reinterpreted images, as well as painted objects displayed directly on the walls. Moving between personal memories and popular culture, Lola Jay explores not only what images preserve, but also what they transform.
Ultimately, Quelque chose a changé evokes that strange moment when we rediscover an old image: everything seems to be there, perfectly recognisable, and yet something, unmistakably, has changed.
Lola Jay lives and works in the Geneva region.
Her work has notably been presented with Swiss Art Value in the group exhibition Living-Room at Espace_L in Geneva in 2021, and again as part of Swiss Art Value in 2022. In 2024, she presented Rencontre, a duo exhibition with Elliott Jan at Le Pressoir in Confignon. Her painting practice continues to develop alongside her work as a graphic designer and illustrator.
Stéphanie Prizreni
Espace Kugler Gallery
