A bra thrown on a rack, a paintbrush lying on the ground, a slumped pillow, a closed book, closed shutters and a woman leaning back on a sofa, mask over her eyes and head thrown back, arms crossed, glass in hand. It is the insomnia transcribed by Brigitte Aubignac on the canvas, where a heady harsh light speaks of the exacerbated impotence in the face of slipping sleep. This all-too-rare artist, who has been building a body of work as strong as it is singular since the 1980s, is one of the excellent surprises of Figures alone, the first temporary exhibition to be presented at the MA space, on the second floor of Lee Ufan Arles, a foundation created last year in the Bouches-du-Rhône sub-prefecture, on the site of the Diport-Vernon hotel , by the Korean visual artist. The latter gave carte blanche to the art critic Philippe Dagen to develop an artistic journey, provided that it is figurative, in opposition to his own corpus. The guest curator has brought together the works of five artists of different ages and origins but working in France around the theme of the isolated human figure.
Like Brigitte Aubignac, the young Ymane Chabi-Gara populates her paintings with furniture and objects of all kinds. Even if, with her, the clutter and the superimposition of the elements that encircle her, or literally cover her, tend to make the human being disappear, here thehikikomori (“the one who lives cut off from the world” in Japanese), with closed eyes and a frozen posture.
Ymane Chabi-Gara, “Hikikomori 5”, 2020.
/ © Ymane Chabi-Gara, Adagp, Paris, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Mennour, Paris. Photo Archives Mennour (private collection)
The single figures of Marc Desgrandchamps are often represented from behind. Their geometric contours and lines as translucent as they are enigmatic which act as decoration cut short any interpretation and in fact make their perception less immediately obvious, less striking. While the compositions of Tim Eitel and Djamel Tatah restore, on the contrary, by removing any explicit environment or decor, the extreme solitude of their respective characters, the first going so far as to make the protagonist evaporate from the frame of which nothing remains. more than an evanescent silhouette.
Tim Eitel, “Open Circle”, 2017.
/ © Tim Eitel, Adagp, Paris, 2023. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Eigen + Art, The Pace Gallery and Jousse Entreprise. Coll. private
With Brigitte Aubignac, the notion of loneliness also passes through her portraits, such as that of the Shout, which sees a female figure, gag in the mouth, measure up to the dread of a condemnation without appeal to silence. That which would consist of “no longer speaking or never being heard”, notes Philippe Dagen, who defends his artists with fervor, or rather praises the coherence of their meeting on the picture rails: “The five artists sought and seek to inscribe in their paintings loneliness, a state that escapes its representation. They put their art to the test and push it to its limits. This is yet another reason to be interested in them and to make enter into conversation about their works around this exhibition.”
The conversation does indeed take place, not through the creative processes of the club of five, which are very disparate, but through the interplay of clashes which manage, if we look closely, some delightful perspectives between the works, sometimes one room to another, at the corner of a passage, an airlock, a transition between two rooms. As if to invite us to embrace the whole as much as the singular.