“Each day is woven in the expectation and in the hope of seeing a hint of meaning floating on the stream of dreams, something that holds, like a boat, a fish out of water that we could grab, a whisper that we could hear thanks to the slow stroke, to the touch under our fingers.” Thierry Bodson, excerpt from a poem from the “Des champs des puits” project.
For the solo exhibition Traits d'union at ODRADEK, I pursue the reflection on painting, language, and space, which started from the Annunciations of Fra Angelico in the project Le lieu qui te revêt and on the connections between language, drawing and textile in the Des Champs des puits project.
Traits d’union associates works created by concentrated and meticulous gestures, through techniques such as collage or sewing, which link posture to breath.
My works are constructed with fragments of material, pieces of rice paper drawn, painted and sewn by hand for the paintings and morsels of impressions of Annunciations and of press photographs, on paper, for the collages.
Leftovers are placed on the paper, vestiges of images leading our gaze towards a dispersed, contemporary and distant elsewhere. Read more
La surface du chant by Didier Escole
Traits d'union, solo exhibition at ODRADEK gallery, November 2023, Brussels, Belgium.
Installation view. Vestiges, oil painting on rice paper, hand sewn 240 x 260 cm (each painting), 2023. Photo Gilles Ribero.
Installation view. Vestiges, oil painting on rice paper, hand sewn 240 x 260 cm (each painting), 2023. Photo Gilles Ribero.
Vestiges, technique mixte sur papier, 13 x 19.5 cm, 2023.
Installation view, collages of Le lieu qui te revêt project, 2021-22. Photo Gilles Ribero.
Project Des champs des puits, crochet, 430 x 10 cm , 2019. Photo Gilles Ribero.
Detail crochet, 430 x 10 cm , 2019, Photo Gilles Ribero.
Project Des champs des puits. Installation view. Mixed medias, variable dimensions, 2018-22. Photo Gilles Ribero
Le project Le lieu qui te revêt was developed during the artist residency at Firm Artlab from October 2021 to Januar 2022. Brussels, Belgium.
Le lieu qui te revêt is composed of paintings and collages inspired by the Annunciations by Fra Angelico (Italian painter, 1395-1455).
I extracted a few words or sentences from the analysis that Georges Didi-Huberman carries out in the book "Before the image", of the fresco of the Annunciation that Fra Angelico painted in cell three of the San Marco convent in Florence. These words guided me when making decisions about my pictorial choices:
“Mystery. Frontal white. Contemplation surface, a dream screen. Angelico’s white, this almost nothing visible. The Annunciation, the announcement. The image of everything that devours us in the evidence of dreams. Exegetical work that the use of a pigment manages to deliver itself. What is in front of becomes all around, and the white that the monk was contemplating perhaps whispers to him: I am the place where you live - the cell itself -, I am the place that contains you. Thus, do you make yourself present to the mystery of the Annunciation, beyond representing it to yourself. The place that covers you.”
Oil painting on rice paper, hand sewn, 280 x 176 cm, 2021. Photo Gaethan Dehoux. Firm Artlab, Brussels, Belgium, 2021/22
Collage on paper, 21.5 x 25.3 cm, 2021.
Gianni Caravaggio, Valentina Perazzini, Natalia Blanch - Yamamo karate club, Brussels, 4 and 5 May 2019.
Valentina Perazzini wrote as introduction to the exhibition:
"It’s been a while since I have wanted to gather in a common exhibition visual artists who, like me, are also devoted martial artists (by devoted I mean artists that are equally committed to their visual as well as their martial art); therefore, when I was afforded the opportunity to intervene in a dojo, this event assumed its raison d'être."
Pictures by Alessandro Costanzo
Delicada Urgencia, pencil on paper 62 x 80 cm and 100 x 200 cm each, 2019 / “When I see the eyes I have in mine tattooed”, thread dyed by hand and crocheted 9 x 173.5 cm, 2016.
Delicada Urgencia (detail) pencil on paper 100 x 200 cm each, 2019.
Next to the Kamiza (altar): Delicada urgencia, pencil on paper 39 x 58 cm, 2019
Delicada urgencia is a series of drawings made for the exhibition "Keep in touch". The title is from a poem by Alejandra Pizarnik. In her poetry, language (the extreme precision of words and form) opens to silence, to an interior space of a powerful fluidity.
In this series, I wonder specifically about disappearance.
Symbolic disappearance of the ego to let the work (and the movement) emerge. The dojos of aikido and meditation are the perfect places to become aware of one's ego and to modify it, from a selfish ego to a less egoist self.
Disappearance also refers to death. On the one hand I feel the urgency of the movement and I see unfold on the tatami the warlike origin of the techniques and its transformation into disciplines whose aspiration is the harmony between human beings. On the other hand I wonder what it is to die, and therefore to live? In the book The Spirit of Aikido, Kisshômaru Ueshiba writes: “It does not matter how long life lasts, it only lasts a second, renewed by our mind at every moment."
Acrylic paint on the wall, 9 x 6 m, 2008
Digital video PAL 2'52”, 2008
Un moment sur l’aile du vent
Solo exhibition, Espace Vallès, Saint Martin d’Hères, France, 2008
The installation in situ consist of a text/drawing, a wall painting and a video. The text/drawing is the transcription of the sound recording of the childhood memories of my grandmothers transformed into drawing through the sewing of the words, the wall painting is its scale enlarged reproduction. The video shows the writing of my childhood memories at the rate of the narrative of the grandmothers.
Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, Havana, Cuba, 2000.
Performance and installation.
Pencil on vellum paper, 15 x 21 cm, approx. 400 drawings.
Wooden table: 120 cm (h) x 120 cm (w) x 76 cm (d).
I recorded significant sounds of Havana, Cuba. Then I translated them to its pattern which was mixed – in the drawings – with the line wave of my electrocardiogram.