The display of this exhibition invites you to find a flow between the various mediums of painting, collages, calligraphy and photography. This exhibition mixes works grounding in stillness with some reflecting movement, some about suffocating and some about spaciousness, some very intimate and other impersonal. It is about Change. It is about noticing change and expressing change. Changes of light, changes of mood, change as an invitation for growth, and of course more actual than ever changes of times.
The painting on the invitation is inspired by a small shop on the side of the road in a remote village near Mount Kenya. The canvas big size allows a journey through the vitality and saturation of the colors but also the painful poverty underlying. It reflects the joy and libido of the soil in Africa as well as the fragility of life there and everywhere. When colors and shapes meet, new forms emerge, making space for themselves between the squares, like a scream. Something raw is revealed and it hides its shyness behind the delicate white layer like behind a bride’s veil.
It’s also about revealing. Revealing what is hidden behind what is seen. It’ s about layers of seeing, and revealing. It offers itself to your eyes, and invites what wants to be seen to be revealed.
An emotion in you, a thought, a movement that you didn’t notice before.
The photo of the pool catches your eyes and your mind (is it a real pool?), but more interestingly than the mental or visual attraction, it is the composition that carries the artist’s message here; each character avoids to look at each other! This work questions our lack of sincere interest and curiosity for each other.
Both in paintings and photos, whether abstract or expressive, familiar or unsettling, this art is flexible, unbound by a structure, a rule or a goal.
The artist’s commitment to presence and freedom makes it about permanent change. The work reinvents itself at each stroke of the brush or at each shot. It follows a current until this current changes, and this happens again and again, on its own time.
This is why you can’t easily define a style, a line of work, or a unique message. The guidance is in the change. The change is the only permanent characteristic. It is for now, and this too, will change.
The exhibition includes a series of paintings inspired by dialogues (between humans, materials or emotions), and more technical games with colors in monochromatic works. Some of the paintings include various media like collage of my photos, or of calligraphy made in a week long self retreat.
Some photos are hijacked photos of groups of children posing for someone else, and most of the sceneries are shot when the light changes at dawn or dusk.
The variety of media and style may stimulate your curiosity or irritate you. Works in this exhibition have been re-arranged to elicit a reaction to change, sometimes a harmonious melody, sometimes a sharp turn on a path. Series have been intentionally scattered and works have been re-arranged according to their visual features, stressing out the change of style or media.
The works exposed are about seeing the details and the textures, seeing what has never been seen before, at this precise instant, under this precise light, from this angle. And likewise, nobody ever looked at it in this precise angle at this moment under this precise light. It is about timelessness than resides in an instant if only you are open to notice it.
Change is permanent, we all know that instinctively and spend quite a lot of our energy hiding it from ourselves. The COVID crisis has unveiled a lot of uncertainty and shaken our “order of things” in every single domain….This exhibition is an invitation to explore this theme.
You are invited to walk and see, pause, breathe and let what wants to reveal itself be seen. Notice what you notice, and enjoy the ride!
