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Legends from W A to X, 2020 Joël Andrianomearisoa
Atlantic is pleased to present the exhibition Legends from W A to X by Joël Andrianomearisoa (b. 1977 in Antananarivo, Madagascar). This series is a single chapter of ten unique works.
The artist and ATLANTIC will dedicate all proceeds from the exhibition to the Cercle des Ami.es de la Fondation Zinsou, to support the Foundation’s various initiatives, including free access to the Museum and its activities for the benefit of Beninese people, such as the Atelier des Petits Pinceaux.
Each artist’s series represents an intimate chapter in the novel that is written with each new project. A chapter that could be read as an independent short story. If, at first, we recognize the artist’s classic figures of style, such as the black textile alliterations that punctuate the canvases, we are struck by the audacity of the choice of textiles, which contrast violently with the series that precede it, such as Les Herbes folles du vieux logis. The loincloth that underlies the construction of the work can be read as a poetic anacoluthe.
The artist breaks with colorful abstraction and embraces the motif. But the motif here is not what it seems: the sweet potato leaf or the swallow cannot be read in terms of what they seem to represent. The artist works with the essence of the loincloth and with what gives it its importance in West African societies: its symbolism and the text that underlies it. In this respect, the Dutch textile is merely the medium for the emotion, poetry or violence embodied in its motifs. Finally, we thought we’d broken away from abstraction, but here we find it again in the decorrelation between the presence of the motif and its importance, which lies not in what we see but in the symbolism it contains.
By using a textile so far removed from his own practice, the artist seems to be paying homage to a territory that embodies more than the limits of its geography, and stands as a symbol of a continent. These ten works are not anchored in Africa by the Dutch loincloth that gives them their materiality, but by a fine understanding of society’s most important codes, the homage to the women who built this heritage and to those who materialize the work - in the motifs of this fabric, the women of Cotonou and those of Madagascar seem to meet - but also the question of the roots and anchoring of the artist, who evolves in a space traversed by the violence of history, seeking to bring to light the emotion, poetry and nostalgia that have long been denied to him. he layers of textiles are like the many pages of a thick novel, like the pieces of loincloth piled up on the steps of the Tokpa staircase, like a mille-feuilles of stories and legends. The textiles step out of the frame, as if these legends were to be freed from the usual formalism of paintings.