Caroline Kent (b. 1975, Stirling, Illinois) is a visual artist who lives and works in Chicago. Her abstract paintings featuring irregular geometric shapes are often characterized by a deep, matte black background from which her bright forms and motifs detach themselves. This rich, dark ground operates on a number of levels, going against the grain of the display conventions of the white cube as well as opening onto the role (and the repression) of blackness within the history of abstraction. The shapes that populate her paintings are first devised in paper using the technique of decoupage, a preparatory step that infuses them with an intuitive, playful and tactile quality that she subsequently transposes to the canvas. There, she overlays solid, flat forms with shapes featuring more transparent and irregular painterly finishes. Kent imagines the articulation of these different elements as constituting a kind of syntax or grammar, akin to a cryptic, abstract language – Proclamations from the Deep, as the title of a 2021 solo exhibition put it. This linguistic dimension is completed by the various graphic marks that dot the surfaces of the canvas like punctuation or diacritics. In this, they point back various different aspects of the history of abstraction, from its origin in spiritual and occult currents in the 19^th century where it served to transcribe messages from other planes of being to and to the utopian aspirations of the 20^th century, when its proponents hoped that it might constitute a universal mode of communication. For the exhibition Echo, Delay, Reverb Caroline Kent has been invited to produce a large mural work in the foyer of the Palais de Tokyo, facing out over the public spaces and the windows that overlook the esplanade. With this placement, her work will form both a prelude to the exhibition’s introduction on the first floor and a kind of transformer through which visitors will pass as they make their way to subsequent sections of the lower level. Its abstract language will take up the sensuality, playfulness and productive instability that characterize certain currents of French and Francophone philosophy, scaling them up to offer a bold visual and bodily experience.