It is a “remarkable” exhibition that “speaks powerfully to each of us because it addresses the essential themes of love and death, of the instability of the world and its permanence,” comments art critic Samia Berrada.
In a text dedicated to the exhibition, Samia Berrada notes that, like the eponymous film (2013) by Jim Jarmusch to which the title explicitly pays homage, the works of Itaf Benjelloun, Mounat Charrat, Narjisse El Joubari, Isabelle Molto, Fatime Zahra Morjani and Cristin Richard, created for the occasion, “all explore, with the singular sensitivity, techniques and poetry specific to each of the artists, the chaos of a world in decline and the possible regeneration that it conceals within itself”.
“Thanks to a subtle scenography by curator Kenza Amrouk, the works were put into dialogue to invalidate our vision of death. Rather than denying it or evoking it discreetly, as we do in our modern societies, with fear and euphemism, the exhibition invites the visitor to confront it radically, through artistic works that shake us up and invite us to reflect on what makes us human: death yes, but also love and art that resist it!”, notes the critic.
Two paintings open the exhibition and “bring us into the fantastical universe of Jim Jarmush’s palimpsest film,” we read in its presentation.
“Déflagration céleste” by Narjisse El Joubari, an immense canvas of 2m x 3m, is, in his eyes, an invitation to travel in weightlessness in a hypnotic space-time, that of a sky where nuances and clouds undulate as if to infinity, crossed by explosions of light. At a corner of the painting, almost imperceptible, a gaze emerges: that of a couple, not of vampires but of motionless birds, wings folded, perched on an invisible branch. All the emotion created by this painting is in the emergence of these birds suspended like a moment of love stolen from the fleetingness of life that passes.
Another inaugural work that caught the attention of the critics: “Dans mes veines” by Itaf Benjelloun, which immediately grabs the visitor: death, a ghostly allegory, appears in its verticality, its spectral whiteness, lying down (standing?) as if pushed by the metal springs of its funeral bed. Through this “strange representation”, she notes, the artist, like a true miracle worker, “makes absence present, gives life and substance to inert, worn, recovered, fragmented materials; the heart, seat of life and love, emerging like a fantastic object, with these cable-veins, from under the folds of the sheets, a white shroud, like an organ that is always beating”.
“Could Love be this indestructible energy, which death never reaches?” asks Samia Berrada in this regard.
It is “this blood-red love that we discover”, she continues, in the monochrome works of the Madrilenian Isabelle Molto with “Flaming hearts”, or “Almas gemelas” and other pairs of rag hearts.
Each work brings, in her opinion, its response in “this complex dialogue that feeds on essentiality”. Isabel Molto evokes the regeneration of a world that reinvents itself with its own ashes.
In the works of Mounat Charrat, the dominant black is draped in gold and light to radiate the soul of a mineral universe. The world is undone and remade on the debris of existence, captivated in the weightlessness of space. A heart-root emanating from chance, or the staging of a face-to-face between two souls in full moulting, revives the carnal relationship of man with the mineral or the vegetable. Thus “The Gold Inside”, a golden face with vegetal hair, appears as a nod to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a reminiscence of the nymph Daphne who became a tree, a thin bark enveloping her and the top of a tree crowning her head.
In her reading of the exhibited works, Samia Berrada’s eye also focuses on a representation of a world “in the grip of the destruction of the symbiotic bond of love that unites man and his environment”. She cites the triptych of multicoloured hearts (Trifles) by Cristin Richard (an artist from Detroit), collages of images of food stuffing hearts, denouncing the overabundance of consumer society, or the installation and paintings by Fatime Zohra Morjani showing in filigree the devastating action of man on his environment, with his blood-red human imprints (Good Stuff) that she makes bloom on the dark bodies of plants and landscapes like so many traces of trauma.
Decline and rebirth are in permanent tension in this work which constantly questions the role of humans in the era of the Anthropocene, writes the art critic.
“Man is sucking the life out of Nature, threatening it with extinction… but that’s without taking into account artists, who are also sucking the life out of Nature, of course, but to recreate, to save the world from death and oblivion,” notes Samia Berrada, in reference to the film “Only Lovers Left Alive” by Jim Jarmusch, which inspired the exhibition.
Aware that every work feeds off of others, Jim Jarmusch recently confided to a journalist: “I am passionate about reappropriation; you take something and make something else out of it. That is the basis of all art.”
In this respect, the critic maintains that artists “are indeed these Lovers who, thanks to what constitutes the very essence of Art, resist Death by sucking the sap of everything around them! Only Lovers Left Alive!”, specifying that each of the artists in the exhibition bears witness to “this demiurgic, even vampiric power of artistic creation”: Cristin Richard recycles animal skins and furs (Endangered Species) to breathe new life into found objects, Itaf Benjelloun makes an old desk, which has become a coffin/collection of crumpled memories (Archives), palpitate using a clever play of pendulums and mirrors that seems to multiply time to infinity, Mounat Charrat resuscitates a dead tree by reinjecting it with a golden sap: an allusion to the epitaph inscribed on the tomb of the poet André Breton: “I seek the gold of time”.
“An immersive exhibition which often features the visitor’s reflective gaze and guides their wandering to make it a unique emotional experience!” concludes critic Samia Berrada.
Mixing paintings on canvas and installations, the exhibition brings together artists from the Galerie Kent in Tangier and other guests until June 9 to pay tribute to the film “Only Lovers Left Alive” by Jim Jarmusch, released in 2013 with Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt and Anton Yelchin in the lead roles.
2024-09-08 15:28:28