INÈS LONGEVIAL: LES SILENCES DU DÉSIR

Almine Rech Shangai is pleased to present Les Silences du Désir, by the artist Inès Longevial. The flowers, mute accomplices of her voluntary exile, were for her much more than simple decorations. They became shields, fragile ramparts against the ceaseless din of the world.

May 31 - July 6, 2024

Inès Longevial gives life to a giant, a brute yet fragile force, evoking a repressed desire that is expressed through every stroke of paint. The lines of Cécile Coulon’s poem “My Strength”1 echo here: “My strength smothers / Those who prevent it / From moving forward,” depicting an internal struggle that is felt in the palpable vigor and energy of the painter’s work.

In the privacy of her studio, this female excess emerges from her brush expressing its own rules and desires. Her eyes marked with melancholy in the first painting, Tulipe noire, gradually look up at others, unrestrainedly revealing a violence, her desire, her sexuality, like a constant transformation, thus embodying the complexity of human passions and unveiling the unsuspected depths of the artistic soul.

This is especially evident in her blue painting Le cri, where a naked giantess with the painter’s features shouts not from fear, but from liberation, like a conquering roar. She is faced with witnesses: other facets of humanity caught like a frieze of existence scattered with flowers.

In this painter’s enchanting universe, the search for meaning is revealed as a guiding theme that runs through every painting in the exhibition. The solitary giantess “clasping flowers like sacred relics” embodies this aspiration to find a deeper meaning in a world without magic.

Les Silences du Désir also highlights a series of small exquisite corpses drawn during the artist’s time in Spain. These patchworks show the influence of surrealist practices in Longevial’s work.

Each drawing is an open window onto the artist’s unconscious, a journey into the twists and turns of the imaginary, somewhere between the real and the fantastic.  Contemplating them, the viewer is invited to get lost in a maze of symbols and hidden meanings.