“it was a hot day, a day that was blue all through”, we can read in the opening paragraphs of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, written in 1932. According to the author, it is his most poetic novel. A dystopic tale in which the main character—a prisoner waiting for his sentence to be carried out—invents an imaginary world made up of metaphors and allusions. In which a day can become blue, a jailer can waltz and a spider can talk. The novel’s controversial end suggests that the prisoner escapes from being executed thanks to his imagination, which transports him on a journey between time and space. Azar Nafisi analysed this book in her autobiographical novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2002). While teaching western literature at the University of Tehran during the 1979 revolution, she extolled the strength of fiction and its transcendent power. She wrote how, under a regime that annihilates metaphors and allusions, the understanding of stories and of literature withers away. Fiction becomes flat and banal in the service of a cause and the nuances of narrative disappear.
Daring to lay down an image, to hold reality at a distance, to liberate yourself from it or deny it are all ways that artists have created in order to be free. Fiction persists in artworks despite the chaotic confusion of new data, and despite a perpetual and monotonous din. Stories, metaphors and imaginary tales lie at the heart of this exhibition.
Intergalactic worlds, drawing their references from all kinds of cultures, feature in Inès di Folco Jemni’s canvases. In her oil paintings, highlighted with Venetian turpentine and glitter, imaginary characters appear, with female traits, travelling in a fictional, indeterminate space. Details of towns with medieval architectures, magical, sometimes-carnivorous flowers, fairies, and dense, mauve sunsets can be glimpsed. The atmosphere of a sacred rite proliferates, wavering between Message, Souvenir and Médina.
In his sculptures, Ladji Diaby creates a new, highly personal language, linked to his home environment, in a direct relationship with his origins. There is always a question of objects and images, which he uses as transfers—a technique he exploits in his work to speak of spirituality, emotions, feelings and idols, but also of the absurdity of official, imposed narratives.
Tomasz Kowalski’s work oscillates freely between different eras and styles in the history of art, while producing an iconography in which his own, fragmented imagination can evolve. He destroys the hierarchy between sleep, dreaming and wakefulness while celebrating the freedom of the subconscious. His characters sometimes seem to vanish into depths of colour. In collaboration with his mother, the textile artist Alicja Kowalska, Tomasz Kowalski has also developed a tapestry practice.
There has been much talk of the apocalyptic aesthetic of Cezary Poniatowski’s works in relief, made of imitation leather, carpets, extruded polystyrene or insulation foam. This is science fiction conveyed by forms and objects often codified as coming from Eastern Europe. Through the prism of memory, symbols and a sardonic sense of humour, these reliefs describe a technocratic world, awaiting transformation.
In Peng Zuqiang’s film The Cyan Garden, 2022, collective history and personal stories intertwine. The image rotates around a former clandestine radio station, active from 1969 to 1981, now supposedly a hotel. “Voice of the Malayan Revolution” can be heard before the protagonist flips the switch to select a romantic song and continue cleaning an Airbnb apartment, with a traditional décor, somewhere, in another town, drifting between the past and the present.
Participating artists:
Ladji Diaby, Inès di Folco Jemni, Tomasz Kowalski, Cezary Poniatowski, Peng Zuqiang
at Crèvecœur, Paris
until April 13, 2024