The Phenomenology of Empathy: From Fragment to Collective Form
The curatorial theme interrogates the accentuation of the collective unconscious and its sublimation into a cultural montage, articulated through the works of Arie Otten (Netherlands), Carol Hartman (USA), Miriam Fabjan (Canada), Colette Leinman (Israel), Susan Fraser-Hughes (Canada), Dorron Britz (UK), and Rajul Shah (Singapore).
Curator Dorron Britz extends Carl Jung’s conceptualization of the collective unconscious into the domain of contemporary visual discourse. Within this exhibition, Britz investigates the potential of radical reaction as an empathetic recourse—an effective response arising from the individual’s encounter with another’s aphasic condition. His curatorial method dissolves conventional spatial and formal hierarchies within the gallery, positioning each artwork as an autonomous yet referential entity. This strategy dematerializes the rigid boundaries separating artistic dialects, foregrounding empathy as the structuring principle of the collective unconscious.
Series Untethered, Miriam Fabjan (Center)
In this schema, Britz situates the viewer as an integral agent of meaning, whose physical navigation and perceptual engagement generate spatial, experiential, and interpretive pathways within the curatorial frame. Upon entering the exhibition, the visitor encounters Untethered by Miriam Fabjan—a series that enacts the poetics of presence through the recognition of another’s being. Within the institutional parameters of the gallery, the viewer’s own presence is reciprocally acknowledged through the visual languages of sculpture, works on paper, and oil on canvas. Britz’s methodology, which sutures the observer into the narrative fabric of the exhibition, represents a rare and sophisticated curatorial intervention.
The concept of the collective unconscious, as theorized by Jung, arose as an alternative to the individualized unconsciousness often distorted by Freudian interpretation. Artists such as Karel Appel of the COBRA movement reconciled Abstract Expressionism with Figuration, embedding abstraction with a humanistic message of unity. This lineage informs the practice of Arie Otten, regarded as the Donatello of Vedica Gallery. His oeuvre draws upon the Cobra aesthetic and Faux-Naïf sensibility. The series Your Red Lips emerges from Otten’s professional engagement with emergency medical services; the red pigment used in the works is derived from desiccated blood powder—an unflinching materialization of human fragility. Through this series, Otten registers his progression from deconstructive to reconstructive relationality, mapping a transition from aphasic to non-aphasic modes of being.
Series Your Red Lips, Arie Otten
Acceptance, Becoming, Evermore, and Knowing, Rajul Shah (Left quadrant)
What Otten articulates metaphorically, Rajul Shah expresses metonymically. Her geometric abstractions—Acceptance, Becoming, Evermore, and Knowing—examine the philosophical resonance of Kintsugi as a restorative metaphor for the empathetic self. Golden fissures traverse her geometrical compositions, while chromatic tonalities parallel the progressive awakening of the chakras. Born in India and based between Singapore and the United States, Shah integrates her cross-cultural and professional experiences within the pharmaceutical industry across the U.S., Japan, and Singapore. These encounters with binary cultural systems are transmuted into her formal vocabulary. Her works are installed in four quadrants adjacent to Carol Hartman’s monumental Even in the Marshes. Britz’s curatorial arrangement constructs a dialogue of scale and conceptual depth, juxtaposing Shah’s introspective geometries with Hartman’s expressive blue abstractions of marshland ecologies. The latter reflects the pathos of environmental degradation, while Britz’s sequencing intensifies this thematic inquiry—transforming the juxtaposition into an epistemic dialogue on climate distortion, empathy, and repair through Kintsugi’s metaphoric restoration.
Even in the Marshes, Carol Hartman
Colette Leinman, a French Israeli artist, embodies the principle of complementarity among empathetic agents in a collective structure. Her suspended works on plastic mesh, hanging from the gallery ceiling, function as visual proclamations of presence—banners of acknowledgment within the empathetic continuum. Britz’s spatial orchestration of her oeuvre confronts the viewer with the mutable definition of the “empath,” a construct often mythologized within contemporary culture. Leinman’s practice engages the immediacy of individual experience to desublimate culture, counterbalancing the collective impulse toward sublimation. Following her works, Britz’s own pieces explore chromatic and kinetic fields as manifestations of internal empathy expanding toward realization.
[Right corner] N’Hommade 266 (Left), My daily heroine (Center), and The wild look of rationalism (Right); Colette Leinman
Britz’s compositions serve as conceptual referents to those of Leinman and Susan Fraser-Hughes. The latter confronts the existential dimensions of identity through her series Just a Moment, presented for the second time in Paris in 2025. Fraser-Hughes’s hyperrealistic depictions of faceless mannequins articulate the performative anonymity of modern identity, where societal reflection erases the contours of the self. Comprising more than seventeen works, the Just a Moment series coalesces into a singular sculptural statement, transforming multiplicity into unity. This methodological synthesis—assembling multiple perspectives into one composite form—extends Michelangelo’s David beyond its classical idealism, recontextualizing it as a contemporary meditation on fragmentation and self-perception.
Series Just a Moment (Center), Susan Fraser-Hughes.
Restless lie - while golden moments fly (Bottom Right), Rebirth (Up Right), Dorron Britz
The Warrior Empath transcends its immediate identity as an exhibition, emerging as an epistemological inquiry into empathy, perception, and the collective psyche. Under Dorron Britz’s curatorial vision, the gallery operates as a phenomenological organism - a space where consciousness, emotion, and materiality converge. Each artist contributes a distinct semiotic register to a shared linguistic field of human experience. The exhibition thus invites its audience not merely to observe but to inhabit empathy as a state of being - to become, in essence, the warrior empath who both perceives and participates in the act of collective becoming.
Sculptures by Arie Otten
The Warrior Empath
Opening event – 6 – 8 PM, 25th October 2025
Artists exhibited – Arie Otten (Netherlands), Carol Hartman (USA), Miriam Fabjan (Canada), Colette Leinman (Israel), Susan Fraser-Hughes (Canada), Dorron Britz (UK), and Rajul Shah (Singapore).
Curation by Dorron Britz
Location – Vedica Art Studios and Gallery, Paris, India
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website: https://www.vedicaartgallery.com