EXHIBITIONS
Retrospective (1995-2020)
Joseph El Hourany
Using morphing and mutation tactics, my sculptures are not pretending to be a particular innovative aesthetic. It looks much more at the overall interplay between the initial idea/sketch and the used wood or material. In its abundance making, a procedural experimentation is the origin of the unpredictable forms. As such, experimentation in sculpture has nothing to do with neither composition nor style. In whichever creation process, it has to do with no‐finality, with the perpetual path to another form; it provokes what comes after, what appears, and what will be seen. It can spontaneously absorb additions, subtractions, and technical modifications, without disturbing its essential order.
Chimera – Remembrance of a Blooming Mind
We enter this exhibition as we would enter a dream peopled by beings of strange ancestry. Their presence bears witness to alchemical tales and it murmurs the charred secrets of a land marked by a great nocturnal sun.
The ceramics of Souraya Haddad Credoz are to be read as creatures born of a universe dormant within us, an environment both familiar and not yet formed. Open to individual readings and interpretations, they offer the possibility of symbiotic futures, promising a history, a temperament, a role, all born of a desire for worlds reinvented.
These creatures, both organic and mineral, make short shrift of what is natural, baroque and artificial. These pieces are representational only in so far as they transfigure possible realities and induce visionary impressions. The play of their presence indeed triggers the imagination, leading deep into the subconscious mind and the images it projects.
A return to that conflagration that destroys in order to exist in sharp fragments, penetrating the skin and the psyche. Confronting what remains in shreds and fragments, the hands of Souraya Haddad Credoz shape essential, primary forms. Not quite spherical, they are clearly anatomical. With reconstructive, therapeutic gestures, the ceramicist gathers together what is no longer as it was, and has not yet become something else. Going beyond that embryonic limbo, she instills colour and leaves the body, roughly shaped and then polished, to the creative force of the elements.
And the Chimeras within us continue their rounds, walking the earth, inhabited by fantastic darkness, embraced by the colours of survival. Between fire and water, they recount something of the forms of life and intimate explosions, of the earth in flames, but also of hands that caress. And within the unreachable secret of things in movement, they wish to retain their mystery, but then to call out, like a spell, to the living, to solicitude, and then serenity. - Clémence Cottard Hachem (translation PR 3 06 2021)
Chimera - Remembrance of a Blooming Mind
11 June - 31 July, 2021
Hala Mouzannar gives prominence in her work to the materiality, and vicissitudes, of the flesh. She dwells on the material surface of her canvases, creating tears, crusts, and chutes from the manipulation of a mélange of stone powder, silicon, latex, gauze, and oils. The formation of differently textured surfaces, in a range of exuberant and at times corporeal colors, invokes in the viewer visceral bodily sensations of both (interested) pleasure and perturbation.