The term “invisual” is attributed to Alexandre Gurita, an invisual artist and director of the Paris Biennale and ENDA. He originated the concept of invisual art, formulated in the early 2000s to describe an art that exists in forms other than that of the art object.
Invisual art refers neither to an art of the invisible, nor to immaterial art, nor to a simple variation of conceptual art. It describes a deeper shift in the regime of art: the artwork is no longer necessarily conceived as a visible, exhibitable or identifiable object, but as an activity, a relationship, a situation, a protocol, a transmission or a transformation.
This approach draws in particular on the research of Corina Chutaux Mila, whose book Esthétique de l’art invisuel provides one of the first theoretical frameworks devoted to these practices. In her work, invisual art appears as the culmination of a long history in which the art object gradually loses its central self-evidence.
Invisual art does not abolish art; it shifts its centre of gravity. While visual art has historically been organised around the gaze, representation, exhibition and the object, invisual art engages other modes of actualisation: understanding, activating, connecting, transmitting, altering a situation or making transformation possible.
It is therefore no longer simply a matter of producing a work of art, but of bringing art into being.
Beyond the Object
Invisual art belongs to a long history of challenging the artwork: the breakdown of representation, dematerialisation, conceptual art, and relational, contextual, sociological or institutional practices. All these stages have helped move art away from the classical model of the autonomous object intended to be seen, exhibited, preserved or owned.
Éric Monsinjon proposes interpreting this transition towards the invisual through an ontological and historical coherence: modern art has progressively undone the connection between art, representation and the object, thereby opening the possibility of an art whose mode of existence is no longer synonymous with the production of a visible artwork.
Invisual art should not, however, be confused with conceptual art. Conceptual art asserts the primacy of the idea, but it often remains attached to visible forms: texts, photographs, maps, diagrams, videos, documents or selected objects. The invisual crosses a different threshold: it seeks to conceive art where a practice can act without having to appear immediately as an artwork.
The work of Lucy Lippard and John Chandler helps situate the invisual within a history of the dematerialisation of the artwork. This dematerialisation must nevertheless be approached with caution: it does not involve the complete disappearance of matter, but rather a transformation in the status of the artwork and its regime of appearance.
The issue is whether art can exist through gestures, processes, relationships, uses, decisions, organisations or transformations of reality that do not necessarily present themselves as art.
A Double Ontology
Following Éric Monsinjon, invisual art can be understood through two complementary movements: a negative ontology and a positive ontology.
The first movement is a negative ontology. The invisual defines itself through what it refuses to repeat: inherited artistic regimes, the centrality of the artwork as object, the primacy of the gaze, the consumption of images, the fetishisation of the object and the reduction of art to what is immediately available to sight.
This negation is not nihilistic. It carries a memory. It does not destroy the past, but refuses to reproduce it mechanically. It acknowledges the legacy of earlier artistic forms while recognising that simply repeating them is no longer sufficient.
The second movement is a positive ontology, or innovation. It is no longer simply a matter of moving beyond existing forms, but of introducing another way for art to exist. The invisual affirms that art can unfold through activity, relationship, intervention, protocol, circulation, transmission or the transformation of a situation.
A Critique of the Visible
Invisual art is not dogmatically opposed to the visible. It can make use of images, objects, documents, forms or material devices. These elements, however, no longer necessarily constitute the centre of the artistic experience. Instead, they become tools, supports, traces, vectors or operators.
The aim is therefore not to eliminate all materiality. The so-called “dematerialised” world remains profoundly material: digital infrastructures, servers, cables, energy and technical devices. The invisual does not celebrate a naïve immateriality; rather, it questions how art can act without being reduced to what is visible, collectable or consumable.
In a context saturated with images, this question becomes particularly important. Paul Ardenne’s work helps us understand the paradoxical weakening of the image through its proliferation: as images multiply, become commonplace and saturate the realm of perception, they may lose their density, singularity and experiential power.
Invisual art responds to this saturation not by simply rejecting the image, but through a displacement: it seeks elsewhere the conditions for art’s presence, relationships and efficacy.
Another Economy of Art
Invisual art also entails a critique of regimes of value. If the artwork as object becomes primarily a commodity, the relationship between the person who gives and the person who receives is mediated by money, ownership, distinction and social hierarchy.
Marcel Mauss’s thought makes it possible to relate the invisual to a logic of the gift: not as charity or moral gratuity, but as the circulation of practices, ideas, gestures, relationships and forms of attention. Art can then exist in what is transmitted, shared, activated or collectively reconfigured.
Georges Bataille’s thought extends the critical scope of this approach. Through the notion of expenditure, it helps us conceive a partial departure from the logics of profitability, accumulation, ownership and object-based valuation. The invisual is therefore not limited to rejecting the art object; it also seeks to deactivate its fetishistic and commercial power.
A Situated Concept
Invisual art first emerges within a Western history of modern and contemporary art: the crisis of representation, the displacement of the object, dematerialisation, conceptual art, and social, relational and institutional practices.
This genealogy must nevertheless remain situated. The invisual cannot become a new universal category imposed from the centre upon practices that exist elsewhere through different histories, languages and regimes of legitimacy. It must avoid renaming from Europe what other traditions, practices or social forms were already doing differently.
Édouard Glissant’s thought introduces the notions of opacity and relation here. Opacity reminds us that a practice, culture or form of existence does not necessarily have to be made entirely legible according to categories imposed from outside. Relation, meanwhile, makes it possible to conceive art not as an autonomous object, but as an assemblage of gestures, circulations, acts of sharing, interventions and protocols.
Invisual art therefore becomes truly fruitful only when it challenges dominant regimes of visibility, naming and legitimation without producing a new norm in turn.
Invisual Art and Donbat
From this perspective, the Donbat Institute can be understood as an invisual art project: not because it abandons all visible forms, but because its principal forms belong more to protocol, intervention, transmission, organisation and situated transformation than to the production of artworks as objects.
Invisual art thus positions Donbat within an expanded artistic field, where the issue is no longer only what is made visible, but what a practice makes possible.