JOËL ANDRIANOMEARISOA: THINGS AND SOMETHING TO REMEMBER BEFORE DAYLIGHT
Almine Rech presents Things and Something to Remember Before Daylight, a solo exhibition by Joël Andrianomearisoa curated by Jérôme Sans. Best known for investigating the materiality of feelings, the artist explores the universality of human experience, mostly using abstraction to build layers of complex narratives.
March 9 – April 17, 2024
Exceptionally, the show brings together Joël Andrianomearisoa’s extraordinarily diverse variety of preferred media to, in a sense, lay bare his vocabulary. Neon lights, sound, poetry, paintings, tapestries, sculptures, everyday objects - like so many elements of his visual language, brought together in a narrow relationship with handicrafts.
Each of the gallery’s spaces appears like a territory serving to investigate new approaches to painting, through the many ways in which textiles can be worked by hand. Cut and sewn, spun and woven, knotted or embroidered, textiles become a thread running through the exhibition, linking one room to the next. Like so many reflections and works on memory and on the human hand, the materials are stuck together and transformed to tell new stories.
Like sound scores animating the space with new energy, his large curtain-paintings redesign the gallery rooms. These non-rigid walls seem to remap the space and open up new ways of moving around, new perceptions. Made up of a variety of textile strips, mixed together and transformed into multilayered abstract paintings, these collage-like hanging elements imbue the exhibition space with a sensory dimension that invites the beholder on a journey from one world to another, like airlocks leading to new entries.
The dainty, double-sided curtain-paintings express the brittleness and vulnerability of human experience, but also all our oft-conflicting layers of thoughts and feelings. The two sides, in keeping with the diversity of works on show and their compositional polyphony, are a poetic nod to the plurality of beings and emotions, to their endless shades.
Halfway between two timeframes, two romanticisms, two sentimentalities, Joël Andrianomearisoa plays with the poetry of duality. Things and Something to Remember Before Daylight shines light on in-between states and turns the gallery into a threshold space where two realities may coexist: dreams and reality, day and night, time and multifarious, almost indescribable spaces.
By brazenly changing the direction of reading, Andrianomearisoa encourages viewers to lose themselves in the intricacies of his paintings and words, to penetrate the mysteries of an impending sunrise, in the suspended hours of nighttime when everything is the stuff of dreams, reverie and sentimentality.