Cosmopolitis, one might think of a city whose boundaries would be the cosmos. A city on Earth where we would all be citizens of the same town. These eight artists brought together outside the walls by the Depardieu gallery refuse the homogenization of culture. As much as they are united to offer the public their works and reflections, they assert their differences. “It is in difference that one enriches oneself,” said a philosopher. This exhibition meets this expectation: to enrich oneself with the other.
These eight artists invite us each into their universe, their vision of the world. With Karim Méziani, we find ourselves in an oriental tale where gold is the light of the soul and spirit. We are invited on a journey in black and white with paintings that seem suspended. Eliz Barboza and her gouaches shed weight. Alaleh Alamir creates marvelous plays of shadows and lights, evolving, like them, in an ethereal and aerial dimension.
Elli Chrysidou, for her part, leads us with her Memento Mori to the border between life and death. What happens next? She shows us the last vision, captured at the moment of demise. Alain Lestié takes us through a wheat field, where the grass has risen, turned golden, and soon the harvests will follow—a rhythm of the four seasons with admirably rendered and incandescent light. Maria Torp is a portraitist, and besides these, we will admire those two crossed hands deformed by work and of poignant reality. Uffe Weiland, with bamboo mobiles, wants to demonstrate time in suspension, this very time he freezes with the word again. “The only word that expresses the present and the future,” explains this artist-philosopher.
This again is also the number of his clock, where a feather marks the passage of hours, a time that keeps moving: again and again. The final artist, Ultra Violet, might propose to take our portrait with her three mirrors. Let’s inject a bit of dark humor: with her phallus pistol, one might erase this portrait. But in an exhibition, everything must end well, and Ultra Violet offers us a rainbow, calm after the storm and tempest.
The Depardieu gallery will pursue this exhibition until July 27, 2013. It is an opportunity for the modern art enthusiast to discover and appreciate these artists united in Cosmopolitis, a mix of genres, an immense hope against uniform thinking.
Thierry Jan
