EPODE
7 avril > 13 mai 2023
Ana Monsó
Mathias Bensimon
PRESS RELEASE VIRTUAL VISIT CONTACT
GHOST PROJECT PART I
GHOST GALERIE PARIS
GHOST PROJECT IS AN EXHIBITION PROGRAM DEDICATED TO HIGHLIGHTING THE EMERGING CONTEMPORARY ART SCENE.
EPODE becomes a fragmentary response, where the exhibition space becomes a tangibilia, a sensitive object, the prism through which the substantive light of the work moves. This is where the poetics of Ana Monsó and Mathias Bensimon unfold. They question the variations of the work, and the relationship it has with space and light; consubstantial entities of the art object. Within this exhibition, the paintings presented by Ana Monsó force us to question the message of the work, to look for the singular, the nuance; like the solitary gaze that sweeps through urban life, Ana forces the viewer to take time, to stop on the hidden signs of a memorial presence; symbolic where the poetic vision arises: letters, words, which reveal the metaphor of the memory, barely visible, a that-was.
What does the title EPODE say about your work and your way of painting? What does it mean to you?
In my works there is a coexistence of two separate worlds, made visible in one: the rational world and the poetic world. What we see are nostalgic abstract reinterpretations of my own memories, reinterpretations that are resolved in two stages. The first is the rational stage, where I reinterpret my memories by freely drawing what the moment I am reviving suggests to me. The second is the poetic stage, in which the symbols created during the “rational” stage are covered with a layer of paint. By adding the paint freely, I don’t know what will or will not be visible once it dries. This is a metaphor for what remains visible of that memory now in me, as some elements of the memory have been erased, as in the paint. The two stages, or in other words, the two worlds (poetic and rational) coexist and work together to create a final piece, a song, that leads to a new world; just as in an Epode where two unequal verses form the final lyrical couplet. Ana Monsó
What does the title EPODE say about your work and your way of painting? What does it mean to you?
To evoke what the word epode brought to life in me, I would quote Horace: “But I, for whom life has no charm but you living, if not unbearable? You tell me to continue in my leisure. Will I do it? It is sweet only with you.” In order to provoke an existential reflection, I would like to address the question: By what are we animated? The enigma of creation has always been sublimated by an existential dichotomy, a subtle balance between evanescence and timelessness. It is indeed that our perception of the world is based on three constituent elements, matter, energy and knowledge (information). Thus, an artistic creation is itself tinged with these principles, by incorporating matter, from our daily life, energy, embodied by gesture, movement and action, as well as affective or sensory intelligence, the emotional tone that emanates from the work and the experience it provokes. Being similar to a fundamental necessity for the human being, it is however deprived of any practical utility, carrying in itself this paradox which makes of it at the same time a spiritual manifestation (of the spirit) and physical (in matter) by inducing a sensitive experience. Mathias Bensimon
Ana Monsó
Born in 1998 in Barcelona, Spain
Studying at Cambridge (Art and Design) and then in London (Fashion Design at the University of the Arts), Ana Monsó defines herself as multidisciplinary artist. Her artistic practice conveys a spontaneous spirit inspired by her childhood memories. “When I grow up, I want to be a kid again”. She is currently one of the resident artists of the contemporary art program Piramidón in Barcelona, along with twenty other artists, and has just been selected to join the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2023.
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Mathias Bensimon
Born in 1996 in Paris, France
Graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2022, Mathias Bensimon is a French artist, visual artist, performer and dancer. He received a multiple training within the academy: Ann Veronica Janssens (light and transparency), Wernher Bouwens (color and installation), Emmanuelle Huynh (movement) allowing him to participate in various artistic projects in France and abroad: Museu Arqueologico do Carmo, Museum of Fine arts, Ho Chi Minh City, the Temple of Hesadera, Tokyo Musashino museum, the Grand Palais, chez Paulin in Paris alongside Anish Kapoor; to participate in Prizes (Dior Prize, Château de la Colle Noire); artistic events (nuit Blanche in Paris in 2022). Or to realize monumental frescoes (Cogedim, Jean-Michel Wilmotte).
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WHEN I GROW UP, I WANT TO BE A CHILD AGAIN
I center my work on the self-reflection of sacred moments in my life. Drawing from my childhood memories, I create freely, allowing the final work to be a fusion of my inspirations. My work is an ode to latent childlike innocence. I try to reinterpret the world without rules and boundaries, as a child would do before social judgment and established norms were imposed.
Ana Monsó
STATEMENT
In the field of my practice, light constitutes the heart of my work. Light as a medium and substance, but also light as a revealing intelligence. As a testimony of the different manifestations of reality, light can appear to us under a multitude of forms and reflections. It raises the question of the visible and the invisible. How to make visible the invisible? How to touch the immaterial source while passing by the matter?
Mathias Bensimon
REMINISCENCE
7 avril > 13 mai 2023
Clémence Appie Gbonon
Hakim Sahiri
Félix Taburet & Hannah Becquante
Djabril Boukhenaïssi
PRESS RELEASE VIRTUAL VISIT CONTACT
GHOST PROJECT PART II
GHOST GALERIE PARIS
The artist’s genius is to make ghosts seem real, to offer a recomposed vision, transposed by the sensitive plate of memory, and revealed by the work. Reminiscence offers a journey, an intimate wander through imagination and reality, between the darkness of night and the sensitive glow of day, blinding and suspended; between the belated awareness of dreams and their evanescence as soon as their ghosts are revealed. “The only true voyage, the only bath of youth, would not be to go towards new landscapes, but to have other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.” Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière
WHAT DOES "REMINISCENCE" MEAN TO YOU?
From dusk to dawn, Reminiscence traces the path taken by Felix, Hannah, Hakim, Clémence and Djabril. This conjuncture invokes a return to the spirit through images, sensations and emotions, leaving an unalterable trace in reality. Augustin Rothea
Proust, of course, but also Bergson and Bachelard, the authors I’m most interested in at the moment. Reminiscence is linked to loss and reconstruction, because every memory is the product of an assembly and shaping of the past. It’s from this word that I’m trying to work, to understand what’s happening and to build a picture from what we draw from these phenomenological experiences. (…) There are materials that can help us work on these questions, and I’m convinced that pastel is one of them. This is partly what’s at stake in the paintings I’m showing at Ghost, which are formal attempts to evoke these notions.. Djabril Boukhenaïssi
Trying to understand how people behave in society, through body language where, paradoxically, it gives a share of intimacy in the public space; that’s what I like. Hakim Sahiri
The term Reminiscence doesn’t choose between the insurmountable image of a previous existence and the memory that unknowingly takes us back to a certain point in our lives. What remains is the hesitation that, from one edge of the word to the other, keeps the expression gaping between its two shores. We don’t want to bet on one or the other, believing that it’s the very state of indecision that must be kept open, provided that from here memory ruins itself by its margins, erases its contours, and becomes undifferentiated by osmosis between us.Félix Taburet et Hannah Becquante
To distance oneself from the subject, not to see it as a deliberate portrait, but as a symbolic figure that has no other meaning than to be painting. Clémence Gbonon
As part of the Ghost project exhibition programme, which focuses on the young contemporary art scene, Ghost galerie Paris is presenting its second group show featuring French artists. Réminiscence explores the work of five artists from distinct and iridescent worlds. Perpetually in search of new mediums, they blend the enigmatic with the spiritual; and, turning the breath of sleep into the breath of life, they make their art the shimmering echo of their cry.
So we have to ask ourselves: Should we always bring back ? Because as we complete this nocturnal journey, we can’t help but wonder about the phantasmagoria that haunts our train of thought. What are these barely recognisable figures? Memories, fantasies, photographic images? Certainly all at once, but surely art, a dreamlike projection transcended by paper, canvas or stone. And in constant opposition to reality, they are the absurd evidence of the world; dream and life, and life put into dreams; eternal echoes, movements of all things. And night is only the path, or the road, or the ford. Léon Vuillecard
Félix Taburet & Hannah Becquante
Night is a journey that Hannah and Félix take us on. When they hear its name, they both marvel: it’s the murmur of day that fades, delivering with it its absence. In this poetics of emptiness – a crumbling mosaic, amputated hands, a head without a body – emptiness reigns everywhere. He leaves the viewer with landscapes of nocturnal spaces, frozen, motionless and silent, or not so; for Félix and Hannah warn: don’t freeze a nature, don’t seal an image, but let yourself be fooled, for they are only ghosts.
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Clémence Appie Gbonon
Dreams are an integral part of her work. Clémence Appie Gbonon tries to forget the conscious mind to allow the images that flow to take shape. The result is the male torso, a symbol of sensual, vulnerable masculinity. This form is the receptacle of a multitude of projections, but it is above all a figure of painting, powerful, tactile and sensual. A dreamlike quality that condenses in the canvas’s ultimate memory; a mystery that materializes in enigmatic scenes, imposing on the eye a beyond to the work: the emerging figure of the incompleteness of being.
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Djabril Boukhenaïssi
Djabril Boukhenaïssi offers the temptation of memory, its heuristics, taking with it the backwash of images that accompany it. There, in front of his erased canvases, the memorial unveils itself; incessant comings and goings of half-painted ghosts. He modulates on the reminiscence of memories and the fragile essence of memory. But these are just memories. But are they really? Or is it just the perpetual mythology of the being that exists in everyone? Created, distorted and erased, only to begin again. These paintings are like reconstructions that awaken and die at every moment. But Djabril always asks: What remains of our memories?
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Hakim Sahiri
Hakim Sahiri’s eye captures subjects in a trance. It is the inemuri that accompanies them. Inemuri is a state of dormancy that exists only because one surrenders and the other one wonders. There is a dialogue between the space of the public gaze and the sleep of the abandoned, the quintessence of intimacy. The artist offers us a poetic contemplation of sleeping bodies, or rather, the vulnerability of the being that offers itself entirely, to the inexorable indifference of the world – what do they dream of?
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