Joël Andrianomearisoa
De Profundis
Until 28 March 2015
Closing reception: Saturday, March 28, 11am
Sabrina Amrani Gallery
Calle Madera, 23
28004 Madrid
T +34 625 06 76 71
hello [at] sabrinaamrani.com
www.sabrinaamrani.com
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Sabrina Amrani Gallery presents De Profundis, the first exhibition at the gallery of Malagasy artist Jöel Andrianomearisoa, leading the viewer almost blindly through a journey from light to darkness; from the primeval dawn of life to mysterious indescribable loss.
In this new exhibition, Andrianomearisoa continues his earlier engagement with the realities of love, their crude manifestations of borderless desire bound up with the most abysmal faces of the world: violence, domination, longing, cruelty, effacement. De Profundis, taking cue from Oscar Wilde’s eponymous prison letter (1897), is not an approximation to but an affirmation of the sinister power of love, its élan vital.
In this strange journey, surfaces become the warm archi-textures of a condition, in a site of contradictions. The black monochrome is for Andrianomearisoa not a terminal end but a monologue and a diary of personal stories tightly sewn into compact wholes by words and gestures; the universality of sentiments. Wilde’s “De Profundis,” written under emotional isolation and the endurance of physical labor is more than a testament of love and devotion, it is also an epic of liberation in the midst of discrimination, criminal libel and exclusion. The artist, inspired by the naturalism of the Victorian Age, is keen to describe the complexities of love—and world—as dark forces, following Wilde more in the rhythmic pattern of the letter, through a desperate cry of life.
In this theater of cruelty, Andrianomearisoa seeks to represent reality by “affect” rather than symbol, using strange and often disturbing elements of performance, effecting a translation between an intense personal journey and current modes of cultural production. The six phases of the exhibition, present a genealogy of love from discovery to contained chaos. Beginning with “Light,” the installation La première aube de l’adolescence avec son délicat épanouissement, sa claire et pure lumière, sa joie pleine d’innocence et d’attente (The first dawn of adolescence with its delicate bloom, its clear and pure light, its joy full of innocence and expectation) is constructed as a light beam that dazzles and confuses the visitor, almost blinding with the candid vision of a metaphor: the birth of the first love.
In the second phase, “Sorrows and Tears,” the first disillusionment settles in, hence the first tears are uproariously displayed in the work Tears, an installation of 50 bottles of water, produced in collaboration with the Spanish brand Numen Premium Water, as an allegory between artwork and product in which the artist continues to experiment with sentimental products, never clean of irony.
The third phase, “Memories of an Affection,” is a threshold before the darkness, conceived as a veil replete with select quotations from Wilde’s “De Profundis,” establishing a relationship between memory, pain and identity beyond the bare material and opening a space for what Roland Barthes stated in A Lover’s Discourse: how to make an affirmation out of extreme solitude.
An installation on canvas made of gold leaf stitched out of found fabric introduces the black in a dichotomy—what is the dark? What is the light? Is the gold light or illusion? “Last Illusions,” eponymous with the fourth phase, makes a reference to sentimental illusions, to false affection. The different hues separate, overlap and blend, in a continuum of reality and feeling, perception and fantasy.
The series “Complex Horizons of Love” in the fifth phase opens as an infinity of horizons in black canvas, between brightness and density, reaching for the intangible and the impossible. What is to be loved? The difficulty to love, to be loved, in a world made strange by lust and dream. Can human beings be truly united or are they universally separated by morphology and opposition?
At the very end, “Labyrinth of Passion,” a series of varnished silk paper on canvas, with conceptual references to sections in Wilde’s letter “De Profundis,” the impossibility of love reveals itself, “from the depths,” obscurity and death, failure and ultimately disappointment, the fabric of contemporary life. The sublime subject is ignored, disparaged or derided. The transition is now complete and the obscured subject is manifested only as a crack or a broken mirror that forbids representation; a distant memory cries in the dark. Are the blinding light and the pitch dark here opposites or are they animated by the very same forces? Joël Andrianomearisoa’s exhibition De Profundis is not a melancholy meditation on love and loss, but a powerful recognition of being still alive, in the midst of these brutal forces.
As an artist, Andrianomearisoa’s insistency on the intimate and fragile is yet the work of a surveyor and ethnographer: mapping out categories of thought and social reality sculpted into immersive environments that simultaneously flatter and deceive; the materials are raw but infinitely delicate, almost at the point of breaking, in a self-contained chaos ready to overflow an entire universe of experience. This experience, however boundless, is not circumscribed by aesthetic purity or formal properties—it is broken piecemeal by the dramas of the political body, public sexuality, the global economy and contemporary alienation. The work attempts to confront us with the emotional abstractness of an uncertain liquid world.
Next May, Sabrina Amrani will present a solo show by Joël Andrianomearisoa in her booth at Art15 London, in the Emerge section of the fair.
Sabrina Amrani Gallery will host a brunch for the closure of the exhibition, Saturday March 28, 11am, at their gallery space in Madrid.
Text by Arie Amaya-Akkermans
Read more about De Profundis by Joël Andrianomearisoa here.
Download press release and high-resolution images here.
For press inquires, please email hello [at] sabrinaamrani.com.
