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
Time
I’ve always painted as if I were jotting down my memoirs. When I was younger, these journals/paintings were quick, violent, loud, and spontaneous. As I grew older, my paintings began to calm gradually. I began to hide my cacophony in the motifs that I would repeat and repeat, as if I were looking for some comfort in the repetition of things and in their ensuing order.
Now I have started sewing beads into my paintings.
At first, I didn’t understand why I was doing this. I certainly didn’t want to “decorate” my painting with beads, nor make intruders out of them. Rather, I wanted them to become a surface, a color, a texture, and a necessity in the composition of the work and in its completeness. I knew I wanted their form, but I also wanted a meaning out of their presence.
It was then that I realized that the repetition of the motifs was no longer enough for me, that I was no longer just painting my memoirs, I realized that I had started “Painting Time” while enacting it on the canvas. I had developed the need to insert the mechanical movement of my body onto the painting, as I would sew one bead after another, slowly, methodically, for hours on end, as if one was either taming or punishing oneself.
What I do now is an exercise in enduring the passage of time that is dedicated to the act of waiting. It is an exercise performed by the lineage of embroidering, knitting, bead sewing grandmothers that came before me.
I wait for time to end what I cannot force to end.
And while waiting for the war to end, while waiting for the son to grow and for life to resume, I will continue sewing beads.