Dora Jeridi, winner of the Emerige 2022 Révélations bursary, has just graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris where, after studying literature and two masters degrees in history, she studied under Djamel Tatah. She well deserves the exhibition just dedicated to her by Galerie Mor Charpentier 1: after her participation in the “Figurations, un autre art d’aujourd’hui” exhibition last summer (see Acumen # 35) 2, we rediscovered the fiery passion of a brush as vibrant as it is inspired.
“I think art is an intensification of reality,” said the winner (b. 1988) at the opening of the “Figurations” exhibition last May. In one of the two works she showed, “La Moisson Vénéneuse”, we saw a young woman resembling her, slumped on a chair, next to a dead horse surrounded by three puddles of colour – green, blue and red – emerging on the unfinished canvas. Today, these puddles have become explosions, sometimes reduced to stripes or streaks, or spreading across the entire surface of the canvas, ablaze with incandescent yellows and reds. After the gaudy pinks and strident yellows that “pierced” her early paintings, here comes the blaze. The blaze and the gush. A flood of enigmatic images and signs, a chaos of lines and stains, trognes and snatches of bodies, cries and grimaces: ruins, visions, reminiscences.
What are we supposed to see in these saturated, tag-like paintings, often combining oil paint and charcoal, sometimes enhanced with spray paint? Nightmares, as the titles Mouth Raid, Death Star, Dangerous Dusk and Poney Club (Guernica for Kids) would seem to suggest?
Tragi-comic Chaos
In Inner Bang, a screaming red face emerges, along with a hand, from a shapeless golden-yellow mass. In “Dangerous Dusk II”, the face and hand reappear with a body, this time dressed in an armour dress, while in “Concrete Anger” they are very succinctly sketched and coloured: the result of a grotesque deformation, “the scream becomes a grimace “3 … Here, we sense that a drama is being played out without being able to determine its origin or object. “Painting allows me to express latent violence. Certain autobiographical events are unspeakable and lead to the need to paint,” the artist confided to Guy Boyer in, “Connaissance des arts” in 2022. “In my paintings, there is meaning, but a meaning that is illegible, incomprehensible. There’s a narrative, but it remains enigmatic,” she explains, explaining that she gives priority to sensations. Sensations and an “atmosphere of crisis” appear tenfold in her latest works, as if there were an urgent need to paint the “real threat of today” 3.
« surface d’impact »
For Dora Jeridi, painting is a “surface of impact”. And “it has to pulse.” 3 As in a piece of music, tempo and writing must vary: mixing the muted dullness of charcoal drawing with the brilliance and density of oil paint, “very graphic”, highly drawn parts with “more abstract or thrown touches”, she seeks to create “different planes” and different rhythms to break up the flat, inert surface of the canvas, imparting “speed, vitality” and “bite”. Multiplying pictorial quotations (here, Rembrandt’s The Flayed Ox, there, the horse from Guernica…) and cinematographic ones, she mixes registers with insolence: the tragic register is superimposed on the grotesque and “cartoonish” register of certain figures or details.
Thus, with a tumble of legs and feet straight out of comic books, she transforms “Guernica” into a “buffoonish battle scene” without, however, lessening its aggressive charge and “explosive dynamic”.
- “Concrete Fear – Dora Jeridi” , Galerie Mor Charpentier (61, rue de Bretagne, Paris III – morcharpentier.com) November 30 – January 6, 2024 “Figurations, un autre art d’aujourd’hui”, Maison Caillebotte (Yerres, 91330), May-October 2023
- Statement taken on December 19, 2023
Upcoming exposition at Galerie Perrotin, New York in January 2025.