EMPTINESS AND MELANCHOLY
Brigitte Aubignac, Ymane Chabi-Gara, Marc Desgrandchamps, Tim Eitel and Djamel Tatah Tatah, five painters working in France on the theme solitary figures. Such is the magnificent exhibition on view this summer at the Fondation Lee Ufan in Arles.
What do the solitary figures painted by Tim Eitel or Djamel Tatah have in common with a stone placed on a glass plate? A stone placed on a glass or metal plate by Korean artist Lee Ufan? Emptiness. That void which, in Djamel Tatah’s 2022 painting Untitled, occupies three quarters of the canvas composed of a large blue background framed on either side by a figure of a man and a column. Column; as in Tim Eitel’s 2006 painting Tür [Door], featuring a large grey rectangle facing a female figure… A troubling mise en abyme (the large grey rectangle echoes the grey pocketbook held by the young woman), closing off the pictorial space. Space, whereas in another painting by the German painter, the large yellow circle towards which a man, shown from behind, is walking
“The confrontation of the human figure with the order of a geometry, by its very nudity and neutrality exacerbates the sensation of isolation and silence”, explains art historian Philippe Dagen, curator of the exhibition. “Tatah’s standing male and female figures give the impression of facing, alone, a world and a time of which, so to speak, they are not really part of. They are separated from it, as they are from the colours in front of which they stand: a distance that we sense is unbridgeable.”
The sensation is just as intense – and sometimes painful – in Eitel’s canvases, who paint the impossibility of […] communication, Eitel and Tatah say, “solitude through the suppression of the surrounding world”. Brigitte Aubignac and Ymane Chabi-Gara, on the other hand, situate their solitary figures in the oppressive disorder of everyday life. Oppressive disorder of everyday life: the unmade sofa of Green Insomnia, the avalanche of papers on and under a suffering desk (Hikikomori 6, 2020) 1 … It is in the confinement, the saturation of space saturation that solitude infuses its poison here.
Floating in a blurred space and temporality, the isolated characters of Marc Desgrandchamps seem to move between several realities, between the tangible and the intangible. Intangible. Often translucent, criss-crossed by underlying landscapes or obscured by branches of dead wood, they appear impenetrable. Like ghosts wandering through a strange world, their evanescence exudes a pungent, acrid fragrance of solitude.
1. In Japanese, hikikomori refers to women or men, usually teenagers or young adults, who live confined to their homes for months or years, refusing all social contact.
Stéphanie Dulout
Catalogue published by Éditions Martin de Halleux, with texts by Philippe Dagen and by Lee Ufan.
“Figures seules”
Lee Ufan Arles
5, rue Vernon, Arles
Until September 24, 2023,