"The Geometry of Grace" exhibition offers a new reading of Horst's work, a cross-section through the thickness that constitutes it from a perspective where fashion photography is no longer a main axis, or even a fundamental structure, but rather a pretext for creating forms and opening up art to new territories. Horst will never cease to invent a language that develops in a spiral, where harmony is the watchword and reaches new heights when he touches on that famous proportion that Euclid referred to in his treatise "Elements" as "the proportion of average and extreme reason", and which the mathematician Luca Pacioli would later describe as divine.
Horst's images are calibrated on measures that consecrate beauty through the harmonious - and mathematical - relationship between parts and whole. This concept has endured through the ages. The Greek sculptor Phidias (5th c. BC) used this proportional relationship to create the statue of the goddess Athena in the Parthenon. Polyclitus, the father of classical Greek anthropometry, did likewise when he created the Doryphone, later adopted by Leonardo da Vinci and the Vitruvian Man, and later by the builders of Romanesque cathedrals and their so-called "builders' quine" rule, based on units of measurements related to the human body (palm, empan, foot, and cubit), values taken up by Le Corbusier in his treatise "Le Modulor", the foundations of which were already in gestation when Horst was his pupil in early 1930.
Geometry is a learned game that Horst constantly reformulates in his work. Whether in drawings, color or black-and-white photographs, each of his images is an architecture, an equation that seems to perpetuate the idea described by Giorgio Agamben, philosopher and specialist in the thought of Walter Benjamin, "that there is a secret rendezvous between the archaic and the modern, not only because the most archaic forms seem to exert a particular fascination on the present, but above all because the key to the modern is hidden in the immemorial and the prehistoric". It is at this precise point, at this intersection, that Horst's monumental, meticulous, and profoundly modern work is built.