Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present Los sueños de la luz / Les rêves de la lumière (The Dreams of Light), an exhibition curated by Marisol Rodriguez featuring the works of Djabril Boukhenaïssi (1993), Marcella Barceló (1992), Camille Fischer (1984), Alexandre Lenoir (1992), Johanna Mirabel (1991) and Marie de Villepin (1986).
This exhibition is a choral portrait of contemporary French creation, presenting approaches to painting from various fields, from music to personal and social narratives. Although the techniques vary from the academic to the experimental, one aspect that unites the practices of these artists is their exploration of the representation of the human form, which oscillates between presence and evanescence, between its shape and its aura.
Inspired by the fruitful dialogue between art history, philosophy and literature, Djabril Boukhenaïssi's work explores the construction and interrelation of memory and social imagination. For this exhibition, the artist developed an original body of work with which he proposes a subtle riddle to the visitor. Faced with a panorama of discordant perspectives inhabited by diverse figures, the artist invites us to consider our position as observers and co-authors of a scene constructed from memories and fiction.
For Boukhenaïssi, as for most of these young artists, literature serves as a consistent companions, as attested by the work of Camille Fischer, inspired, among others, by Lise Deharme, the prolific surrealist writer relegated to the role of André Breton's romantic muse for almost a century; and by the vast body of poetic and critical work of the recently deceased Annie Le Brun, considered the last surrealist. In Fischer's work the societal weight of feminine beauty and the paradoxes of sensuality take shape in installations that integrate the worlds of haute couture, drawing and painting.
Painting's historical capacity to absorb and respond to the culture of its time is evident in the work of Alexandre Lenoir, who integrates the luminous language of digital imaging into a painting process made up of hundreds of layers of colors in varying degrees of dissolution. Like Lenoir, who hails from the French Caribbean islands, Marcella Barceló's childhood exposure to the light and color of an island environment profoundly influences her work. She intricately weaves these elements into a continuous narrative, creating chapters of a never-ending story. Her art, characterized by solitary female figures inhabiting a fantastical world, is deeply infused with her upbringing in Mallorca.
Barceló's intimate formats lead to Johanna Mirabel's imposing canvases that remind viewers of the canonical formats of Baroque painting. This is no coincidence for an artist who emulates the ancient techniques of velatura with diluted iron oxide to achieve a luminous painting that engages both the reds of Velázquez and the reddish sand of Guyana as a critical dialogue between histories.
While Mirabel activates stillness in her work, Marie de Villepin's paintings center action, where gestures are organized throughout the space in a rhythmic and sonic whirlwind. As one approaches her canvases we can almost hear her, carefully delving into the story she tells through each brushstroke.
In the works of these artists, light becomes a medium that reveals and conceals, that illuminates the fragility of the figures and the power of their stories. Each brushstroke, each shadow and glow becomes an echo of our times, where digital and analog, fact and dream, past and present intertwine in a continuous dialogue without borders.
