Laurence Kimmel, Essay about the painting The Architecture of Exile, 2026 © Laurence Kimmel 2026.

French writer and political analyst Victor Hugo spent his time of Exile from France in Hauteville House on the island of Guernsey. Exiled from France by Napoleon III, Hugo spent 15 years on Guernsey between 1858 and 1870. He had never been a house-owner before, and to the great surprise of his wife, he ‘settled in Exile’, developing a home as an architectural artwork. He transformed Hauteville House into a theatrical interior filled with Gothic furniture, original or copies of objects from around the world, and texts (his initials are recognisable in windows and furniture). The design of the house was an expression of his personal mythology, asserting his creative power while in Exile. Every room has a different atmosphere and purpose. The last level, the one that sparked my attention, is part writing studio, part dream-space under the sky.

Victor Hugo’s phrase “EXILIUM VITA EST”, Latin for “Life is Exile”, which he had carved in wood on top of a door of the dining room, meant that Hugo had undergone a transformation like Edward Saïd is describing. “EXILIUM VITA EST” is a radical inversion of the usually destructive experience of Exile: life is not disrupted by Exile, but life is Exile, and Hugo tells us that one must try to dwell meaningfully within that exilic position if one is to experience it. Hugo's phrase becomes a lens through which Exile is creative. Even in displacement, one can create and inhabit with purpose. Architecture becomes not a symbol of stability, but a framework for negotiating Exile: a poetic act within the instability of life.

My painting The Architecture of Exile was developed during a self-organised artist residency in Guernsey. As I said, I was particularly drawn to the uppermost level of the house, which Hugo had built as his workspace. Overlooking the rooftops of Guernsey, it allows one to observe the sea while working. A small desk set by the window enabled him to write within a sheltered, carpeted interior, while remaining open to the vastness of the sky and the ocean. My painting represents this glass house with a stylised version of Hugo’s writing desk at the window. The linear frames of the glass house windows appear as ultrathin elements that tenuously ‘hold’ us within this interior. At the same time, the openness toward the sky and the sea, here abstracted into volutes of pale pink, light grey, and white, creates a sensation of being projected outward. The painting displays dialectics of interior and exterior, and dialectics of anchoring to the ground through the chimney and outward projecting ‘nomadic’ lines of the glasshouse. My intent is that the viewer can feel lost or sinking in some areas of the painting, before finding their ‘way back’ in the dynamics of lines and colour gradients.

This type of geometric window frame has long fascinated me in various buildings. They both frame the sky and, at the same time, hold us within. I often feel that my mind traces and tests the figures generated by these lines. It is from this impulse that I began to inscribe letters into the painting: the ones deriving from Hugo’s phrase “EXILIUM VITA EST”. The painting maintains a strong contrast between its upper and lower sections, producing a marked sense of rupture. The letters function as a fragile connective tissue sustaining a tenuous link between the two sections.

The dark opening toward the lower level extends the perceptual play of letters. The green and teal drops of colour draw on Paul Klee’s idea of the painted dot as a point of potential, a latent origin for lines and geometries. Yet the dots remain suspended, holding that potential in silence.