Papeles, telas y maderas son habitualmente los materiales de los que se sirve Joel Adrianomearisoa para llevar adelante su proyecto creador. Ellos son vehículo de la expresividad de sus obras, para la creación de tramas, texturas, volúmenes y formas. El espacio urbano es habitualmente el escenario que estimula su trabajo y a la vez donde se instala a modo de interferencia, intervención o presencia poética. En este caso, con su serie Embroideries, parecería que el estímulo procede de otros espacios, aquellos vistos desde el aire, en los trayectos entre Madagascar y Francia o España quizás, en donde la superficie terrestre se redefine a grandes rasgos, por planos, para describirse en los cambios de color y matices, en una paleta clara, arenosa, con algunos acentos de mayor intensidad que permiten intuir cierta orografía insinuándose. O en gamas de verdes o azules, en donde se sospechan zonas de vegetación o ruidosos mares.
Esos planos -las superficies de tela en la obra de Joel- se presentan, a veces, atravesados por líneas más o menos sinuosas que remiten rápidamente -si seguimos con la mirada desde el vuelo- a los surcos que se trazan por el paso sostenido de caravanas de animales o gentes, o de ambos quienes en algún tiempo exploraron esos territorios para dejar hoy trazados aquellos dibujos en el espacio que retoma la mirada del artista.
“When the day belongs to the night”, es uno de los textos que se suman a este conjunto de superficies cuidadosamente bordadas, retomando una de las identidades del trabajo de Joel: la inclusion de textos. En este caso, si de lo que se trata es de registrar en el gesto del bordado las marcas de una práctica cultural artesanal, en los contrastes de negros y (casi) blancos, el día y la noche se encuentran, se corresponden mutuamente, como parte de la continuidad de una historia, como parte a su vez de la lógica del migrar en unos casos, del viajar, siempre, en donde permanece, de forma residual el tiempo del sitio de partida.
El espacio de estas obras aparece como una metáfora del espacio real, que es físico pero también cultural, y porqué no, también emocional, por eso, aquella otra sentencia que incluye en esta serie: “We were so very much in love”.
Con cierta presencia melancólica dada por la localización en tiempo pasado de esa historia de amor, se reinscriben las puntadas de esos bordados en historias de espera y ausencia y a la vez de cierto encierro dado por la rigidez en la que están encuadrados cada uno de estos bordados, distinguiéndose de otros trabajos de Joel en los que las superficies se mueven en el espacio con el movimiento de quienes pasan, de la brisa, o del tiempo. Embroideries estaría más ligado a un tiempo de espera, de atenta contención a través de un gesto reiterado que va dibujando en esa espera los espacios transitados en otros tiempo.
Acercándonos a las referencias de este nuevo proyecto, en sus palabras: “I was inspired by the malagasy poet Elie Charles Abraham, a great defender of nostalgia that he promotes specially during his exile and from where I borrowed the title of the exhibitions: the seasons from my heart. Landscapes and moods that change and pass, like out life, our society and specially our hearts”.
The space of our life is neither continuous, nor infinite, neither homogeneous, nor isotropic. But do we really know where it shatters, where it curves, and where it assembles itself? We feel a confused sensation of cracks, hiatus, points of friction, sometimes we have the vague impression that it is getting jammed somewhere, or that it is bursting, or colliding.
Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces
Joël Adrianomearisoa (Madagascar, 1977) develops his artistic work in the fine threshold produced by an indiscernible combination of personal references, allusions to Madagascar’s sociopolitical reality, a certain anthropology of the urban space, and haptic poetry. If the first of these themes is always indexed to his autobiography, and therefore compels us to a certain discretion, which is also inherent to his poetics, the anthropological, spatial and haptic issues he raises can be the object of some reflection.
In the Western world, anthropology of space has had a tradition that, in certain ways, is in opposition to a history of architecture that develops from image (Adrianomearisoa trained as an architect, he is therefore familiar with these issues), particularly obvious in the notion of spatiality advanced by Paul Frankl in the early-20th century (Principles of Architectural History: The Four Phases of Architectural History, first published in 1914), according to whom space is mostly an object of optical perception, a notion furthered by Siegfried Gideon in his Space, Time and Architecture (1941). This an idea of space anchored in visual perception — space as an image —, and one that disregards the body that brings space about, in the sense that space is perceived through vision, and therefore is a datum of experience. The notion of space as a construct arose with Henri Lefebvre, with the creation of representational spaces in which space was always seen as a secretion of the subject — either individual or social. It is upon this possibility that Joël Adrianoamerisoa’s oeuvre is built, in the sense that the sculptural or imaginal situations he creates — which are not limited to their objecthood — are always devoted to a perceptual construction that implies touch — or the anticipation of it. It is based upon this hapticity that Adrianoamerisoa offers the viewer a range of possibilities concerning the creation of intensities. In this respect, it is worthwhile to refer to Gilles Deleuze when he (in Difference and Repetition) notes that the notion of intensity does not exist in the Rationalist and Euclidean formulations of space, where it is possible through repetition.
In this exhibition, Adrianoamerisoa presents works that, in several ways, are declinations of the possibilities of constructing spatialities that, generated by a process of repetition, establish the several declinations of our lived space, which is anisotropic. In fact, this selection of large format pieces, and a sound work that reinforces the project’s spatial nature, proposes both an intensity based on repetition and a hapticity that emerges from the sensual sophistication of the rigorous choice of materials, from their achromatism, and from our craving to touch them.
Waiting for the seventh day that will bring us together in the first hours of the night (2011) is a sculptural set composed of twenty-one elements on a wall, shaping a tension between its material (paper), its near-weightlessness and the massiveness created by repetition (the iteration of paper sheets). This tension is antinomic; repetition, mass and weightlessness oppose in the creation of an interstitially that cuts across the entire exhibition.
The increasing density of the two components of Labyrinths of Passion Act IV and VI (2016) introduces the baroque intensity of the fold, or pleat, reinforcing once more the inevitability of assembling a spatiality from its negative, from the space that lies within it. This produces an intensity that is also made possible by the scale of the work — a monumentality that, nonetheless, is based upon the delicate nature of the work’s construction, tissue paper sheets are bound in folios that make up their density.
The sound piece Somewhere Over the Rainbow (2018) presents us with a sound palimpsest that combines fragments of urban sounds, the poetry of Jean Joseph Rabearivelo (a poet of Madagascar who died prematurely in 1937, and whom Sehghor considered to be the first African modernist), and songs from the artist’s personal memory, in a way repeating the methodology of layered accumulation of different semantic and perceptual levels we have identified in the previous works. On the other hand, the utilization of sound enhances the spatial hapticity of the project, establishing a poetics of space that is based upon an emotionality and contributes to the proposed intensity, while adding a political layer we can discover in the contrast between the camp choice of title, taken from the famous ballad Over the Rainbow, sung by Judy Garland in the movie The Wizard of Oz, and the political situation in Madagascar.
From the different planes of a proposal that is simultaneously aesthetical (in the sense of its plea for a sensorial cognition), spatially haptic and guided by a poetics that emerges from an individual anthropology, arises the fourth characteristic of his work: the persistence of liminality. We owe the concept of liminal space to anthropology; it results from Victor Turner’s appropriation of the interstitial nature of the rites of passage theorized by Arnold Von Gennep. Victor Turner focused his later works on this issue, and particularly on the performative nature of interstitial states, especially in social settings, and defended that these states — the tension between “what lies within” and an outlying shape, and how these fluid states imply a particular performativity — meant the end of the road for the modern concept of perspectival space. The performative space of liminality and its poetic potential are the field of post-modernity, as they refer to human, social, identity or merely subjective states that are not reducible to conditions, but only exist as fluid states.
The work of Joël Adrianoamerisoa is built upon this fluid and negotiated condition; in the interior of the density of his fragile material compositions, in the intensity of the black, within the baroque folds and pleats that produce the different widths of the space he proposes. We remember Perec, as he mused about life, “But do we really know where it shatters, where it curves, and where it assembles itself?”
I do not think so, but that uncertainty is the nature of life.
Sometimes you have to forget, or, if you prefer, momentarily set aside the things you know – those acquired procedures and habits that we use to help us interpret an artwork. Any consideration of the issues Joël Andrianomearisoa raises in his work necessarily has to begin with the artist’s poetic imagination. Although his creations are not particularly challenging to analyse, the contrast between the specificity of the titles he chooses for his works and exhibitions and the all-embracing, opaque abstraction in which those same works operate seems somehow to suggest the existence of some undefined, perhaps inexplicable – and perhaps even impenetrable – tendency. It is as if we are looking at an encounter between two different entities.
Andrianomearisoa’s exhibition at the Centro de Arte Alcobendas brings together a group of works which all tend towards abstraction, but from different registers. But whether the artist’s point of departure in these works is cloth on canvas, paper, tapestries, papier mâché or collage, they all share a certain sense of ambiguity which sometimes links them to the landscape and sometimes alludes to objects and structures. Andrianomearisoa in no way attempts to approach abstraction through pictorial recreation of appropriation, or from a stance critical towards painting or abstraction. Abstraction is simply another element that helps us dissolve any sense of anticipation, any preliminary narrative. On that basis, Andrianomearisoa places us in a space and a situation that are both unpredictable, where any effort we might make to possess the work, to endow it with meaning as an end in itself, is constantly interrupted.
These works do not aspire to transmit a sense of anti-illusionism. Their aim is just the opposite. Here we are not looking at what would usually be considered the essential elements of painting – brush, paint and canvas – and there is no intention to engage with the practical techniques that have historically been used in abstract painting. Here, literality and minimalistic aspirations are present in appearance only. Indeed these works are more reminiscent of that type of formalist painting in which the artist would mentally immerse spectators in vast colour fields as a means of pushing them into a wholly fictitious space, as, for example, in Andrianomearisoa’s cloth on canvas work The Complex Horizons (De l’Amour et d’un Romance), 2018. What we are talking about, then, is a kind of distracting trick, manipulation or falsification within the work itself, in its execution, its crafting and its potential. But at first sight, the work offers no clue as to its meaning, and this space sheds no light on the structuring of the artist's discourse.
That is not to say that Andrianomearisoa’s work is self-referential or lays any claim to its own distinctive niche. Actually, the artist is not all that far from the “neo-conceptualists” and "neo-minimalists" of the late 1980s and 1990s, who emerged to challenge – among other things - subjectivism, emotionalism, and the heroic stance adopted by the “neoexpressionists”. Like them, Andrianomearisoa adopts abstraction to serve his own interests. As I suggested earlier, abstraction is a vehicle. Moreover, Andrianomearisoa is fully aware that abstraction is a force which operates in both the economic and social spheres. For him, abstraction also creates potentially poetic images and can be used to address his own personal experience. The originality and the quest for the absolute which marked much of classical abstract art from Malevich through to Barnett Newman are here replaced by an ambiguity and an ambivalence that are never fully clarified. Andrianomearisoa seems not only to break free from the anguish of what has influenced him but also to assert his desire to expand his own visual language.
This s nowhere more evident than in the titles of his works and exhibitions. Here we find something different, something that does not usually correspond to the realm of the works themselves, and when it does – like in The Complex Horizons, which ostensibly refers to landscape – is immediately dissolved in a specific definition which contrasts with the image we see in the work (in this case ( De l’Amour et d’un Romance) (About Love and an Affair). The title of this exhibition illustrates the establishment of two disjunctive, complementary spaces: that is to say, two spaces that are separate but at the same time intrinsically linked, space which considerably extend the visual language of the works on display while simultaneously presenting the spectator with the dilemma of choosing between different alternatives. But just how far does a title like No habíamos terminado de hablar sobre el amor (We Hadn’t Finished Talking About Love) – the title of this show in Alcobendas – explain and expand upon the work we are going to see or have already seen? What kind of works does it suggest? In what kind of space does it want to place the spectator?
In a recent conversation, the artist admitted that, as we suspected, the title of the exhibition is taken from Jean Genet. That in itself undoubtedly puts us in a whole new mental arena, evoking images that contrast with the opacity of the works on display. Like Genet’s never-ending love, such titles – with their references to names of books, poems, verses, films and groups - forge a compact, intense space of possibilities in which we are allowed to conjure up all kinds of narratives. Here, the artist’s poetic imagination is condensed and spectators are bombarded with references and images that involve them directly in the work. But what work are we talking about? Where does a work start and finish? What should we focus on - the physical, visual space of the objects and structures the artist offers us or that imaginary space made up of fragments of other ideas, other discourses, other origins?
There is admittedly an abundance of darkness, but the artist also celebrates light. I said earlier that Andrianomearisoa uses abstraction to create potentially poetic images and to address his own personal experience. Similarly, the titles help him to establish interruptions and disjunctures that highlight the resources of his own imagination and reveal the other side of his intentions. Andrianomearisoa lives and works between Paris and Antananarivo, Madagascar. His art and his ideas arise out of both locations, and cannot be said to be determined, given meaning or fixed in one single space by either of them. From the economic, political and social legacy of colonialism, the adoption and adaptation of colonial cultures and the affirmation that both his own subjectivity and the culture of his country are essentially different, Andrianomearisoa fashions a discourse of disjuncture and contrast, a dialectic space marked not by the successful hybridization of the parts but by a continuous sliding backwards and forwards between one idea and another. Like the empty containers of his series Vestiges of Ecstasy, 2016-2018, his reality is made up of remembered objects and ideas that are progressively shaped over time but which lack any real content in themselves.
The disjuncture and the interruptions come into play precisely in this in-between space, between the work and “its references”, between the titles and “the work”, preventing us from grasping the artist’s imagination in a clear defined space. It is here where Joël Andrianomearisoa weaves together the ambiguities, contradictions and possibilities that endow his work with meaning and depth.
In Western artistic tradition, the monochrome or the use of a reduced chromatic spectrum was often associated with a certain mistrust of manual labor — or so say modern discourses.
However, the monochrome has called upon a progressive and inherent proficiency in the fields of craftsmanship and opticality — at least since the emergence of a certain canonical formulation (we could say, after the coming of age of the ubiquitous proposals by Yves Klein and the darkening of the palette by Ad Reinhardt). Even if this process seems to contradict the programmatic character of condensing the range of the palette, it is still self-justifiable: the nominal condensation of the palette entailed the amplification of the subtlety of the gaze; the construction and development of tonal gradients, either assisted by phenomenological or by analytical reasons, called for a very specific know-how and for an increasingly demanding procedural excellence.
In a first approach, it is within this lineage that we can locate the work by Joël Adrianomearisoa, a Paris based artist born in Madagascar, in 1977. Using paper, textiles, glass or photographic images, his pieces are elaborate serial spatial constructions with white and black gradients, evoking Piero Manzoni’s achromas and the work of Robert Ryman. In relation to the latter, the comparison is almost inevitable as both artists develop a serial work that depends on a proficiency of execution in which their production of meaning is contained. Joël Adrianomearisoa’s fake monochromes (fake because they have several tones) are often three-dimensional and do not permit an analytical approach — their proximity to traditional practices, the way they imply timeless, collective, and often ritual procedures (such as how to wrap the body), convokes an anthropology or, at least, the creation of an anthropological procedure dedicated to the complexity of the urban. These traditional and plastic experiences of the body, which include the use of the Lamba (a traditional garment used in Madagascar as a polymorphic cover for the body) and the dressing of the body for the burial ceremonies, are part of the many convocations we can find in Adrianomerisoa’s body of work. We also detect a second difference, which is possibly as significant as the first. The artist outlines a poetics of space through the articulation of spatial structures that, sometimes, convey a certain irony, which is almost hidden behind the delicate materials used by the artist. To put in fewer words, in his work we identify a baroque awareness of space — something we probably owe to his studies in architecture — in the sense that meaning exudes from the fold, from the pleats that structure his visual formulations, from the interstitial spaces that (also) characterize baroque space. Reasonably cryptic autobiographical references, delicate materials, ductile and fragile shapes, all work as engines that activate references to cultural contexts, as well as to the field of the subtle poetics of the quotidian, to the urban as the place where multiple languages converge as image.
Sabrina Amrani Gallery is pleased to present When the day belongs to the night, a project specifically created for India Art Fair 2017 by Joël Andrianomearisoa. The artist was interested in envisioning a project that speaks to Madagascar and India’s complex, and multiplicitous landscape of shared experiences, as well as to his own aesthetic interest in memory and nostalgia. The result is When the day belongs to the night, a triptych that is at once a monumental construction undergirded by intricate structures, a painting that experiments with fields of colour, and a tapestry that weaves together melancholia, remembrances, and personal narratives.
Andrianomearisoa grew up in Madagascar, a lozenge-shaped island that is still attached, in the depths of the ocean, to the continental plate of Africa. Yet it has a long and influential relationship with the Subcontinent – through trade winds, the three-cornered dhows, and sailors’ and traders’ adventuresome desires for what lies beyond. Madagascar is thus the embodiment of both influences: one side witness to the sunrise and the cultural pull of the Indian Ocean world, and the other, to the setting sun and the geographic proximity of Africa. One might also acknowledge a third horizon: that of Europe, -France and UK in particular as former colonial powers, drawing Madagascar’s and India’s gaze through their considerable influence.
On a slim island that lies facing north-northeast and south-south west, these monumental horizons – formed by sea, sky, sun, and political history – dominate one’s everyday experiences. In Andrianomearisoa’s work, we see that the linearity of the horizon also reveals the complexity of contact; it exposes the ragged edges of relationships that seem, from a distance, determined to define and delineate themselves from each other using clear and continuous boundaries. But in his horizons, there is an acknowledgement that the Subcontinent of India, Africa and Europe came together in this island outpost – a remnant of a broken love, sometimes acknowledged, and at others, denied, a connection maintained through a sea of tears, forgotten narratives, and intangible memories.
Andrianomearisoa is a trained architect who developed his knowledge under the tutelage of Odile Decq – one of the most esteemed female architects in France – at the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris. The influence of architecture – and the artist’s interest in complex layers necessary for creating form and structure – is unmistakable in this triptych. Each section only reveals its intricate, underlying structure when one moves closer; it is only when we develop a relationship with the work that we notice that these three monumental “wall” structures are not impenetrable.
Each section of the triptych is about 3 meters in length and 2 meters high. The triptych’s monumental structure – and the fields of black, perforated by longitudinal mineral veins of gold – suggests a contradiction: it is both a formidable boundary and an invitation. It forbids our desire to enter, indicating an end to exploration and freedom; yet, at the same time, we are drawn to the wall of shimmering black and gold, attracted by the play of reflected and absorbed light.
In order to achieve density and depth in the sections that are black, the artist used new, black cotton cloth made in Madagascar. It was cut into three-centimetre by three-centimetre pieces, which were then affixed to the foundational structure of each part of the triptych, to form dark fields of mobile tiles. However, for the sections that appear gold in this triptych, Andrianomearisoa searched for texture and complexity, in order to project a field of many shades, rather than attempting to create a composition in a singular or pure colour. He favoured used materials, each of which bears the experiences of their previous owners – narratives that were inevitably threaded between the underlying structure of the fibres. Included in the gold sections are fifty scarves, each of which had a previous life and history, about ten metres of tablecloth and napkins, all of which were found in a second-hand market in Madagascar, and some sarees bought in Jodhpur, India. Finally, he also used a colourful material that is made especially for funeral shrouds in Madagascar. This funeral shroud, intermingled with other detritus of existence, reminds us that we, too – so enmeshed though we may be in the business of living and making gold and golden memories – will one day have use for this shroud.
Evident in Andrianomearisoa’s use of materials that speak of “dark atmospheres” – the black fibres, funeral shrouds, and materials with unacknowledged or forgotten histories – we note the artist’s interest in psychological undertows that often determine our attractions and aversions. In what appears to be fields of impenetrable blackness and melancholia, there also exist layers of multiplicity and complexity; what seems, from a distance, to be simple, monochromatic sections separated by clean lines are not so distinct from one another. As we move closer to the triptych, we realise that the walls of darkness – which we often fear and attempt to suppress – are always at play with a thousand shades of light and shimmer, texture and depth. We recognise that it is the liminal moments – where the gold intermingles with the black, when the day belongs to the night – that yield richer conversations with our own psyches. Our “shadow selves” – those dark histories that we often suppress into the subconscious, but nevertheless affect our daily decisions – are always with us.
Andrianomearisoa’s work allows us to understand that if we embrace the complexity and beauty of our gleaming shadow selves, if we have the courage to develop a relationship with all that seems unlovable within us, we may learn to relish the conversations that result from acceptance.
Joël Andrianomearisoa is the recipient of the IV Audemars Piguet Award ARCOmadrid 2016. His work, Negociations sentimentales Act V (Sentimental Negotiations Act V) was featured in the ambitious and critically acclaimed exhibition “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists”, curated by Simon Njami, at the National Museum of African Art in 2015.
M. Neelika Jayawardane is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She was a senior editor and contributor to the online magazine, Africa is a Country, from 2010-2106. Her writing is featured in Transitions, Contemporary&, Art South Africa, Contemporary Practices: Visual Art from the Middle East, and Research in African Literatures. She writes about and collaborates with visual artists.
Joël Andrianomearisoa est venu à l’art comme d’autres vont se promener. Balançant entre l’architecture et le stylisme qui vont le lasser, son attirance pour les formes pures, dépourvues de fonctionnalité immédiate, s’affirme très vite. La forme sera la matrice autour de laquelle s’articulera la création. Dans ses premiers travaux, on eut pu croire que la forme se suffisait à elle-même, organique et génératrice d’un sens auquel l’artiste n’attachait pas une importance primordiale. La forme comme esthétique en soi, comme manifeste d’une inspiration qui refusait, paradoxalement, de se laisser enfermer dans un quelconque discours. La forme comme unique discours donc, manifeste d’une liberté de créer qui s’affranchit des questions récurrentes auxquelles sont confrontés les artistes qui n’appartiennent pas à l’histoire européenne. Un espace dans lequel on est libre de dire sans avoir à démontrer son identité. La forme comme unique forme d’universalité. Une espèce d’existentialisme artistique qui ferait précéder l’existence à toute essence. Cet objet est brai puisque je l’ai créé, et il porte en lui-même, comme une indicible évidence, sa propre justification.
Il y a, dans cette attitude, une indéniable urbanité. Non pas au sens classique du terme, qui faisait référence à une certaine éducation (quoi que), mais dans le sens urbain du terme. Il existe ici une manifestation de ce que je nommerais la contemporanéité élective. Celle qui nous conduit à inventer notre famille, non pas en fonction de données biologiques, mais selon des codes esthétiques et culturels, presque générationnel. Joël Andrianomearisoa est sans doute plus proche de l’artiste de Tokyo ou de New York que de l’un quelconque de ses compatriotes malgaches. D’où la difficulté qu’il y aurait à le définir, tant les références qui le font être sont entremêlées, contradictoires, parfois. Si l’on regarde l’évolution de son travail, depuis ses premières œuvres textiles directement inspirées par sa période styliste, jusqu’aux « sculptures plan » qu’ils explore aujourd’hui, l’on s’aperçoit rapidement qu’il n’est attaché à aucune technique particulière et que, comme un alchimiste à la recherche de la pierre philosophale, il n’hésite pas à faire main basse sur toutes les formes qui pourraient apporter une autre couleur à son univers plastique.
Photographie, installations, performances, vidéos, sculptures, au sens le plus large du terme, il est prêt à tout envisager, dès lors que l’outil choisi serait le plus à même de traduire son état du moment. Comme un compositeur qui s’appliquerait à pratiquer le plus grand nombre d’instruments possibles pour en savoir la sonorité et les spécificités, il explore les possibles, sans souci de fabriquer une œuvre à la cohérence évidence. Une œuvre dont on pourrait, dire au premier coup d’œil, qui en est l’auteur. Ce qui démontre sans doute, mieux que toute démonstration savante, le trait particulier de son caractère : un trait commun à tous les artistes contemporains qui n’entendent pas se limiter à une zone de confort commerciale et attendue. Je nommerai ce trait de caractère schizophrénie.
Le schizophrène, en termes cliniques, est un fou. Mais rappelons-nous, avant d’aller plus loin, que Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, Nietzsche ou Nerval, pour n’en citer que quelques uns, avaient rangés dans cette catégorie. Sans appartenir à cette frange de l’art brut que les Américains nomment, avec une certaines ambiguïtés les outsiders, ils furent bel et bien perçus comme des êtres à part. Eugen Bleuler, qui est à l’origine du mot, s’appuyant sur la théorie freudienne, sera celui qui donnera de cette affection la définition qui semble la plus adaptée à notre propos. En effet, selon ce dernier, les notions de personnalité, de soi, de relation du sujet au monde (intérieur et extérieur) jouent un rôle considérable dans cette « maladie ». Si nous comprenons bien les propos de Bleuler, il apparaît que nous pourrions appliquer cette définition à tout être contemporain. La contemporanéité, à mon sens, c’est le renoncement à toute forme d’identité exclusive, à toute forme de nationalisme et d’essentialité. L’être contemporain se meut sur plusieurs dimensions, est fabriqué par de multiples expériences parfois contradictoires, et c’est précisément ce qui fait sa force : il ne se laisse enfermer dans aucune prison identitaire, et son rapport à autrui comme à soi-même s’en trouve complexifié. Lorsque l’on voudrait le catégoriser par rapport à telle ou telle partie de sa biographie, il s’en échappe pour resurgir ailleurs.
Et au-delà, je reviendrai ici sur le terme outsider, qui contient tellement de sens, pour l’appliquer, non pas au travail de Joël, mais à la manière dont il se perçoit dans le milieu de l’art. Il semble toujours vouloir se maintenir à la marge, pour ne pas tomber dans le quotidien d’un métier dont les différents aspects matériels ne correspondent pas à l’élan poétique et désintéressé que l’on prête en général aux artistes. Attitude aristocratique qui consiste à refuser de produire selon l’air du temps et le discours à la mode. Créer un espace original qui n’obérait aucune si ce n’est celle du plaisir initial de faire. Comme si le ponde devenait un vaste champ d’expérimentation où aucun tabou ne serait. Mais sous l’apparente légèreté des propositions de l’artiste se cache une quête que, par pudeur, il n’affichera jamais. Une double quête, plutôt, qui interroge l’essence même de ce que nous appelons art, et de son rapport à l’être intime, à la vie. Etre un outsider permet d’être à la fois dedans et dehors, évoluant dans une zone indéterminée. Cela autorise, ultimement, la mise en scène de la dualité que Deleuze a perçu dans toute tentative artistique : « L’esthétique souffre d’une dualité déchirante. Elle désigne d’une part la théorie de la sensibilité comme forme de l’expérience possible ; d’autre part la théorie de l’art comme réflexion de l’expérience réelle. Pour que les deux sens se rejoignent, il faut que les conditions de l’expérience en général deviennent elles-mêmes conditions de l’expérience réelle ; l’œuvre d’art, de son côté, apparaît alors comme expérimentation. »
Il semblerait que la dualité évoquée ici par Deleuze ne concerne pas tant l’esthétique que l’artiste qu’est Joël Andrianomearisoa. C’est peut-être la raison pour laquelle, consciemment ou inconsciemment, Il tente, à travers ces « expériences » artistiques qu’il poursuit maintenant depuis quelques années, de faire fusionner l’expérience réelle et l’expérimentation, les confondant à travers le prisme de sa sensibilité. Cette géométrie froide qui semble ordonner son œuvre, ce noir dominant, cette apparente « cérébralité », ne sont peut-être là que comme autant de trompe-l’œil, qui masqueraient la sensibilité qui perce dans ses photographies ou dans la fragilité apparente de ses papiers sculpture. Le noir, comme le blanc, deviennent couleur, expressions polymorphes d’un monde en devenir. D’un monde que l’artiste pressent sans parvenir à le saisir tout à fait. D’où cette sensation de déséquilibre permanent, de tension entre l’objet réel et l’objet projeté qui renvoie toujours à autre chose qu’à ce qu’il nous est donné de voir.
Pourtant, à travers chaque œuvre, qu’elle prenne l’apparence d’une nonchalance dandy ou le sérieux d’une structure architecturale, c’est à une mise à nu permanente que nous assistons. Une guerre à jamais ouverte entre la pensée (vécue ici comme une sensibilité indéchiffrable) et l’objet qui est sensée la traduire. Une expérience bouleversante et en même temps régénératrice, puisqu’elle entraine à une renégociation permanente, à une remise en cause constante des évidences avérées. C’est dans l’espace psychologique de cette renégociation particulière que se construisent les éléments d’un nouveau langage plastique et esthétique qui intègre un jeu d’allers-retours permanents, dont la matrice forge ces êtres contemporains qui n’ont plus d’autre choix, pour ne pas devenir fous, que de mettre à jour, au quotidien, l’expression de leurs ultimes dualités. Cette expression, pour être vivante, doit être, comme le savoir nietzchéen, joyeuse et légère, comme ce bricolage qu’Ernst Bloch regrettait de ne plus retrouver les créations de son temps : « Mais nous prenons les choses au commencement. Nous sommes pauvres, nous ne savons plus jouer. Nous l’avons oublié, la main a désappris à bricoler. »
Chez Joël Andrianomearisoa, la main est encore à l’œuvre, et c’est d’elle que jaillit la forme.
ı Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens, Paris, Minuit, 1969
2 Ersnt Bloch, L’esprit de l’utopie, Paris, Gallimard, 1977
Joël Andrianomearisoa’s first solo exhibition at the Goodman Gallery Project Space, 'A Perfect Kind of Love', seduced me rather unexpectedly into taking seriously his sensual investigation into materiality. The gallery was transformed into a formal and conceptual meditation which utilized the potential of a range of materials and objects to evoke the power of the erotic as a tool to understand the complexities of desire. Cut Cute, a live performance that coincided with the end of the exhibition, underscored this and formed a crucial part of the exhibition. Staged in Fox Street, this ephemeral work also provided a necessary contemplative pause in SA Fashion Week’s Winter 2011 Collections’ proceedings at Arts on Main.
'A Perfect Kind of Love' was conceived as an installation of predominantly monochromatic relief works and sculptures built from soft, destructible materials such as paper and plastic. Love Letters, a stack of A4-sized black paper atop a slender plinth, is a poignant introduction to the material and sensual emphasis of the exhibition. The work prompts one to consider the quantity and the repeated monochrome surfaces of the pages on display. The scale of the work is intimate and invites close inspection, just as letters exchanged between lovers are perused closely and once read are treated as the artifacts of an intimate connection. A corresponding stack of paper is displayed close by on a gallery wall. One surface of each piece of paper in this stack of postcard-sized black cards is inscribed with the exhibition’s title in white lettering. It is difficult not to acknowledge the legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres in these paired works. However, whereas viewers were intended to become the ultimate custodians of Gonzalez-Torres’s paper stacks, Andrianomearisoa’s Love Letters are destined for the collector, a private exchange that Gonzales-Torres himself only ever made once when he personally sold a complete stack to a collector.
In a work titled Darling you can make my dreams come true if you say you love me too, Andrianomearisoa develops the idea of appropriation implicit in Love Letters with its allusion to Gonzales-Torres’ posters. Darling you can make my dreams come true... is a close grid of 150 found pocket mirrors mounted on the gallery wall. The black plastic flaps concealing the pocket mirrors within have been opened to varying degrees, flirting with acts of revelation and concealment and diffusing the boundary between the surface of the work and the space just beyond it. The mirrors add to the playful quality of the work, channelling a Minimalist impulse to activate the viewer’s awareness of their presence in relation to the art object.
Andrianomearisoa continues his strategy of appropriation and reconfiguration with Boys Cakes, a pile of 96 haphazardly stacked compressed paper bricks. The humble materials and the installation’s ‘impoverished’ aesthetic is an inadvertent nod to Arte Povera. The work has the feel of a ruin, or a collection of objects salvaged from some unknown catastrophe. Amongst the bricks that were not voided by black paint, emerged pornographic imagery of men engaging in sexual acts with other men. I could not resist interpreting Boys Cakes as a contemporary memento mori or vanitas. Gay identity has undergone major moments of crisis, particulary from the widespread threat of sexually transmitted diseases like HIV/AIDS. Historical moments of trauma like this force us to consider our own mortality by realising the effect that individual action has on a collective body. Boys Cakes is a construction of sexual fantasy that goes hand in hand with a consideration of death. Lust and sexuality can no longer be considered private, and romance inevitably implicates more than two bodies. It seems that for Andrianomearisoa, love is almost synonymous, or at least analogous, with the body. Today both can be commodified and legislated, criminalized and marginalized. Love is a violent political territory, and this remains its attraction as the ‘bad boy’ of all emotions.
A sculpture titled Bondage Cage is unnervingly anthropomorphic. Attached to the gallery wall at approximately knee height, the work seems to cower in the viewer’s presence. It is only once one navigates around Bondage Cage that the structure of a metal cage is revealed behind the mass of tresses which are woven into it and hang from it. The cage appears at once burdened and empowered by the mane of ‘hair’ cascading down its side. With its strands simultaneously resembling braids and the leather extensions attached to whips found in S&M stores, the work is as threatening as it is reassuring. The potential for an intimate experience of the work is underscored by a more promiscuous impulse to caress and pull at it. The work highlights that an art object can induce both cautious restraint and a kind of fetishistic lust.
Le Labyrinthe des Passions (I-IV) (The Labyrinth of Passions), are four square black paper collages respectively, each measuring 250cm by 250cm. Audiences will be familiar with the material covering the surface of these works as tissue paper, the kind commonly found in the shopping bags of more expensive retail purchases. It is a notoriously fragile material, yet in his layering of it onto the square frames, Andrianomearisoa manages to use its tactile possibilities to sumptuous effect. These four works are a prelude to the exhibition’s centre piece, Le Labyrinthe des Passions. This installation of nine black paper collages made in a similar fashion to the aforementioned collages, was a climactic amendment to the gallery’s architecture. The work, consisting of three rows of suspended collage panels, created two passages large enough for viewers to walk through. Meandering through these two passages allows for the inspection of the reverse sides of the collages and for stumbling across an anonymous set of eyes and mouth on two separate collages. Slightly threatening, yet comforting in the way in which it embraces one’s presence, Le Labyrinthe des Passions continues the conceptual threads established by the other works on show.
Andrianomearisoa’s closing performance, Cut Cute was characterised by the same tension between threat and seduction that runs through the works on the exhibition. The performance draws on some of the performative conventions of catwalk fashion shows, in which human models simultaneously animate and become the stage for otherwise inanimate garments. It also emphasises the inherently architectural nature of fashion - items of clothing are soft architectures built to protect and conceal bodies. In this performance, Andrianomearisoa took twenty minutes to improvise dressing six models with a variety of black materials not typically associated with fashion.
I was one of the six volunteers to participate in the work as Andrianomearisoa’s models on the night. A large audience occupied the periphery of a rectangular territory, ordinarily a functioning section of Fox Street parallel to Arts on Main. The area was illuminated with multiple beams of light from overhead studio spotlights. An array of materials awaited the performance, placed strategically within the space by Andrianomearisoa. His inventory included fabric, gaffer tape, insulation tape, plastic packets, paper, ribbon of various widths and rolls of vinyl, all in different shades of black, with the exception of the rare inclusion of an unidentifiable white material. Within moments of the soundtrack starting, an edit compiled for Cut Cute by Andrianomearisoa and collaborators from Paris, he began his transformations. The performers were initially dressed in black vests, trousers and sneakers, while the two female performers climbed into imposing pairs of high-heels. Although I was unable to witness the performance from the outside, my first-hand experience of the materials’ ability to alter the performers’ bodies from their original states so forcefully was profound. As Andrianomearisoa used the performers as anchors in an increasingly full lattice of soft materials, our bodies became a collective unit. Each person’s slightest movement affected the stability of the others. These tenuous and tense connections did not last long though. As the music’s tempo started to suggest the nearing of the end Andrianomearisoa cut at the lattice calculatingly, separating us once again into individual units, now sporting ensembles only an avant-garde couturier could fashion. With this we lined up for the final time, facing both sides of the crowd momentarily before marching off in single file. Our bodies became evocative traces of the performance’s fierce action, where the shifting nature of personal and collective identity was reconciled by an atmosphere of latent violence.
Cut Cute reconciled key elements from Andrianomearisoa’s diverse practice which spans architecture, art, fashion and textiles. The human body remains the locus around which these fields of interests gravitate. Cut Cute’s nod to the protocol of fashion shows is a subversive one, in which the artist visualises an undetermined and spontaneous narrative that goes beyond a premeditated authoritative vision. His process blurs the relationship between fantasy and reality because his well-staged spectacle acts out an uncanny and surreal drama of the work’s own making. Here the fragmented and strange relationships that he puts into play are joyously cryptic. The permanence of art and traditional notions of sculpture are questioned through offerings such as Andrianomearisoa’s, where the ephemeral or short-lived is privileged and performed. The gallery is left behind for an environment that engages a larger public, even though one could claim it has not yet overcome the former’s exclusivity.
Despite obscuring the autobiographical in 'A Perfect Kind of Love', Joël Andrianomearisoa still manages to deliver an authoritative exploration of the intimate and private that speak to broader understandings of love and sexuality. The exhibition and its accompanying performance’s articulation of interpersonal and material relationships, is necessarily obscure and tenuous. Yet the dark sense of humour embedded in some of his titles encourages the viewer to overcome any initial reserve and prompted unexpected explorations of his conceptual motivations. A consistent thread throughout both 'A Perfect Kind of Love' and Cut Cute was a strange sense of modesty. There was a recurring fragility that undercut his grander and more exhibitionist gestures, to the point where one could suggest that his production is remarkably unmonumental. At every turn there is an acknowledgement of transience and even entropic potential, either inherent to the objects’ construction or the deconstructive actions that Andrianomearisoa, paradoxically, uses as an act of creation. It is his transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary without the need to resort to illusion and trickery that makes his work truly beautiful.
Joel Andrianomearisoa court aux quatre coins des expressions dans le bruit de l’art d’aujourd’hui. Contemporain ? Probablement dans l’expression parfaite de la fin des barrières des disciplines.
S’il y a un fil à tirer dans les travaux de Joël Andrianomearisoa c’est l’espace, l’espace des performances, l’espace des vidéos et des corps, l’espaces de tapisseries et des textiles, mêlés de deux sensualités, l’une, improbable, totalement désincarnée qui replie sans cesse son carré fondateur, l’autre qui touche des corps dont l’esthétique a tout à voir avec une beauté incrustée dans notre inconscient. Amusant d’utiliser ce mot indéçant de la « beauté » pour évoquer ces corps noirs et blancs de la nuit, la caresse sur une plaie ouverte renversant les attendus que sans cesse le carré noir fondateur va remettre dans sa géométrie du plaisir.
Regarder la liste des travaux de Joël Andrianomearisoa montre une suite prolifique où le doute est souvent absent quelle que soit la nature de ce qu’il fabrique : il a 19 ans quand il fait la couverture de Revue Noire Madagascar avec la photographie d’une de ses performances. Puis s’empilent ensuite toutes les expériences autour du carré alors qu’il fait ses études d’architecture à Paris : le textile, le costume, l’installation, et toujours la performance. De l’ARC du Musée d’Art Moderne à Paris, à Sydney au Musée des Beaux Arts……, Pascal Marthine Tayou l’intègre dans son - Fun Five Fun Story - où il se lie d’amitié avec Moshekwa Langa. Une bande amicale avec quelques autres, dont le petit jeune serait Joël. Aujourd’hui il sort d’un travail sur l’espace et la vidéo dans la direction artistique qu’il partage avec la chorégraphe Kettly Noel pour sa pièce Chez Rosette créée en juin 2008 pour Montpellier Danse et La Villette à Paris. Tandis qu’il commence un nouveau travail de collage papier où le noir qu’il associe toujours à la géométrie laisse parfois percer la couleur.
Joel avec ses affirmations pleines sinistres et joyeuses, n’a jamais été tenté par la gloire du Rien, mais avidement par la sobriété du Tout. Cela ne voudrait rien dire si justement les images et les espaces, l’univers de Joël Andrianomearisoa n’étaient pas là : donner au non discours, ce nouvel inconnu, une forme.
At first glance, seeing is lost, mislaid in the space of the artwork. One does not know to approach it, an imperceptible field open to fashion, architecture, photography and video. The art of Joël Andrianomearisoa is born from these hybrid exchanges.
In his world, everything becomes material.
In L’Etrange ( 2007 ), Andrianomearisoa films nature in its slightest shivers. He reveals its strangeness without stating it, and delivers it to the eye like a first dawn. Nature fills the space and captures the emerging body-memory. Intrusively and scretely, he caresses and excavates the depths of the vegetative material. In the darkest hours of the night, his flames outline the present in black.
If it were necessary to find common strands in his work, time and the body would be his poetic vectors. « The only thing that matters to me is to deal with time. And what frightens me most is never to be on time, to be outdated. My way of answering this challenge is to be permanently against the current, » he says.*1* Andrianomearisoa’s work puzzles because it builds itself, against the flow of time, in movement, a back-and-forth between assertion and negation.To build or deconstruct, to dress or undress, to fill or empty, to wrinkle or fold, to light up or turn off-the artist is situated between these opposing forces that, according to him, combine rather than conflict. In these paradoxical connections, the works offer infinite propostions.
The colors of black
Black, as a color, is the cornerstone of his work and is omnipresent in his process.
Far from being monochromatic, Andrianomearisoa’s black is one and a thousand colors at the same time. The all-black choice is a permanent challenge that urges the artist to reinterpret and renew the color unceasingly. Depending on the material, composition and lighting angle, his blackness unfolds in endless nuance.
« For me it is a challenge. In every piece, i have to find various colors, different postures of black, »says the artist. « It is not only the color, but also an attitude that does not exclude the rest. It aims toward the universal. Black is amazing, disturbing, but it is present and makes sense everywhere. » Black can embody austerity and minimalism, but it gives the artist the freedom to deconstruct and disintegrate the structure of the work. Black gives him the freedom of exuberance.
The fabric of the dreams
From the beginning, textiles have been recurrent elements of Andrianomearisoa’s work. As he extracts all their possibilities, he gives the materials a polyphony that becomes language, the language of a material that lets itself be split up, folded,creased or mixed.
The variety and superposition of fabrics in his tapestries give them an architectural density that recalls stone. « I like the flexibility of the fabric, which allows all the combinations through tying, weaving, cutting, matching. It carries a language that can go very far, » he says.
The recurrence of fabric may echo the lamba, the ubiquitous textile form of Madagascar. It is a garment in daytime and a blanket at night, and also a shroud to wrap the body. The way one wears the wrap, its material and its number of stripes indicate social position, age and origin.
La vie dans les plis *2*( Life in the folds )
Andrianomearisoa is always on the edges. He does not approach his work in a direct way, but places it at the edges of the desires of whomever discovers it. His work comes down to a question of posture. He listens to the pulses of life with more generosity than they are given, and finds a way to be present in the world dans le nu de la vie, in the nude of life.*3*
Urban space is a primary interest as well. The noises, smells, images, lights and incessant movement that generate city life compose his universe without imprisoning him in a specific geographical space. His images take viewers to places even the artist does not expect to be. « I need to be surprised by images. The situation has to be completely staggered. I do not consider myself as a photographer ; I am someone who makes images, » he says
To compose a work, the artist needs a basic frame. Then the experiments begin, the manipulations that outline the project. « The work arises from various manipulations that lead me to the final result. When I set up an installation, I do not imagine its finality. I know the elements that compose it, but in the intant I set them up I discover something else. And that is when the work makes sense, » Andrianomearisoa says.
His poetic virtuosity lies in his capacity to seize this moment of signification, when nobody can tell beginning from end.
ENDNOTES
1 ALL QUOTES COME FROM JOËL ANDRIANOMEARISOA, INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR, NOVEMBER 2007
2 THIS PHRASE COMES FROM THE TITLE OF THE COLLECTION OF POEMS BY HENRI MICHAUX, LA VIE DANS LES PLIS, REV.ED ( 1949 ;REPR.,PARIS : GALLIMARD, 1990).
3 THIS PHRASE COMES FROM THE TITLE OF THE NOVEL BY JEAN HATZFELD, DANS LE NU DE LA VIE ( PARIS : SEUIL,2002).
En premier lieu, se perd le regard. Ne sachant par quel fil l’aborder, il s’égare dans l’espace de l’œuvre, champ insaisissable, ouvert à la mode, l’architecture, la photographie et la vidéo . C’est dans l’alchimie de ces croisements combinatoires, que naît l’œuvre de Joël Andrianomearisoa.
Chez lui, tout devient matière.
Dans L’étrange, l’artiste filme la nature jusque dans ses moindres frémissements. Il en révèle l’étrangeté sans la dire et la livre au regard comme un premier jour. Elle emplit l’espace et happe le corps-mémoire qui y surgit. Intrusif et secret, il caresse et fouille les entrailles de la matière végétale qui s’offre à lui. Aux heures bleues de la nuit, les flammes qu’il provoque dessinent le présent dans le noir.
S’il fallait trouver un fil conducteur à son oeuvre, le temps et le corps en seraient les poétiques vecteurs. « La seule chose qui m’importe c’est de faire avec le temps. Et ce qui m’angoisse le plus, c’est de n’être jamais dans le temps, d’être dépassé. Ma manière de répondre à ce défi, c’est d’être en permanence à contre-courant ». L’œuvre de Joël Andrianomearisoa intrigue parce qu’elle se construit – à contre temps - dans le mouvement. Elle se positionne dans un va et vient entre l’affirmation et la négation. Construire/déconstruire, habiller/déshabiller, remplir/vider, froisser/plier, éclairer/éteindre : l’artiste se situe dans l’entre deux de ces oppositions qui chez lui se combinent plus qu’elles ne s’affrontent. Dans ces étreintes paradoxales, l’œuvre prend sens, offrant une infinité de propositions.
Les couleurs du noir
Pierre angulaire de son œuvre, le noir est omniprésent dans sa démarche.
Loin d’être monochrome, il est pour lui à la fois une et mille couleurs. Ce parti pris du tout noir, relève d’un défi permanent qui pousse l’artiste à réinterpréter la couleur inscrite dans une démarche sans cesse renouvelée. Selon les matériaux, les compositions, les différents angles d’éclairage choisis, le noir déploie dans ses créations une infinité de nuances.
« Pour moi c’est un défi. Dans chaque pièce, je dois trouver différentes couleurs, postures du noir. Ce n’est pas seulement la couleur, c’est une attitude qui n’exclut pas le reste. Elle tend vers l’universel. Le noir intrigue, dérange, mais il est présent et fait sens partout ».
Si le noir peut renvoyer à une certaine idée de l’austérité et du minimalisme, il donne à l’artiste la liberté de déconstruire, de déstructurer l’édifice de l’œuvre. Le noir ouvre l’œuvre et lui donne la liberté de l’exubérance.
L’étoffe des songes
Depuis ses débuts, Joël Andrianomearisoa a fait du textile un élément récurrent de son oeuvre. Parce qu’il en dégage tous les possibles, il lui donne une polyphonie qui devient langage. Nous sommes dans le langage de la matière qui se laisse fragmenter, plier, froisser, mélanger. La diversité et la superposition des tissus mis en scène dans ses tapisseries, leur donne une densité architecturale qui évoque celle de la pierre.« J’aime la malléabilité du tissu qui permet toutes les combinaisons à travers le nouage, le tissage, le découpage, l’assemblage. Il est porteur d’un langage qui peut aller très loin ».
Sa récurrence pourrait faire écho au lamba, étoffe de tissu omniprésente à Madagascar. Il est vêtement le jour et couverture la nuit mais aussi linceul qui enveloppe les corps. La manière dont il est porté, la matière et le nombre de bandes qui le composent, indiquent la position sociale, l’âge, l’origine même de ceux qui le portent.
« La vie dans les plis »
Le travail de Joël Andrianomearisoa se situe toujours à la lisière des choses. Il n’aborde pas son œuvre de manière frontale, se situant au bord du désir de celui qui la découvre. Dans son travail, tout est finalement question de posture. Celle d’un artiste à l’écoute des palpitements de la vie, qui met en scène, plus généreusement qu’il n’y paraît, une manière d’être présent au monde, « dans le nu de la vie ».
L’espace urbain est celui qui l’intéresse le plus. Les bruits, les odeurs, les images, les éclairages, les mouvements incessants générés par la ville, habitent son univers sans l’emprisonner dans un espace géographique identifié. Ses images emmènent le spectateur vers un ailleurs qu’il n’attend pas. « J’ai besoin d’être surpris par les images. Il faut que la situation soit décalée. Je ne me considère pas comme un photographe. Je suis quelqu’un qui fait des images».
Pour les composer, l’artiste a besoin d’un cadre de départ. Commencent alors les expérimentations, les manipulations à travers lesquelles le projet se dessine. « L’œuvre naît de diverses manipulations qui me conduisent au résultat final. Quand je monte une installation, je n’imagine pas sa finalité. Je connais les éléments qui la composent mais c’est dans l’instant où je les mets en place que je redécouvre quelque chose". Et c’est là que l’œuvre prend sens ».
Là réside sans doute la virtuosité poétique de l’artiste, dans sa capacité à saisir l’instant substantiel dont nul ne sait quand il commence, ni quand il finit.
Dans le nu de la vie, titre d’un roman de l’écrivain français Jean Hatzfeld, éditions Le Seuil, Paris, 2002.
La vie dans les plis, titre d’un recueil de poèmes d’Henri Michaux, éditions Gallimard.
Joël Andrianomearisoa croise les genres et les styles : il ne se veut ni couturier ni architecte ni vidéaste, ni designer, ni artiste et pourtant il souscrit au travail du couturier, de l’architecte, du vidéaste, du designer ou de l’artiste. A travers son intuition, apparaît ce mouvement de fond qui traverse les expressions artistiques de notre époque, celui de faire là où on a envie de faire sans autre souci de faire, laissant de côté la carrière spécialisée. Avec le costume et le corps comme points de non retour pour habiller le présent. Un costume cousu, un tissu teint, une image de papier, un film numérique, une matière d’acier, de laine, de bois, de béton ou de coton filés, pour que défile au cœur de la société, le temps, son temps.
Joël Andrianomearisoa se permet de rêver en volume et en matière, un rêve régulier comme une équation mathématique. A la fois intuitivement et intellectuellement, il coud le béton et burine le textile dans une présence de ses rêves découpés au cordeau pour les corps sensuels qui s’y glisseront. Des corps ondulants dans une architecture rigoureuse comme un Mies van der Rohe.
Dessiner et coudre : remettre le corps au centre. Un corps, mille corps qui rêvent et qui rient, qui posent et s’exposent aux autres, sans aucune gène ni fausse pudeur. Joël coupe et découpe une géométrie de l’abstraction, pour une réalité de chair et d’esprit.
Le textile est là , l’image, le bois et le béton aussi, à plat comme un dessin à y glisser son corps et ses rêves. Les regards perdus dans la certitude de la séduction, de l’amour et de l’amitié. Les têtes élégantes, fières ou déférentes, douces ou rudes, d’aujourd’hui comme d’il y a vingt ans ou cinquante ans ne gardent rien d’autre que la propre liberté de chacun dans le monde à être dans son temps, dans son humanité. Antananarivo, la ville capitale de Madagascar, avec ses mille visages et regards vit son devenir à son rythme comme à celui des autres villes du monde. Paris. La libération des pays comme des peuples passe par la libération des rêves de chacun.
Joël Andrianomearisoa vit et travaille à Paris.
The war of the senses - Joël Andrianomearisoa
By Jean Loup Pivin . 1997
Joël is twenty. He hasn’t had time to have a professional past yet but he does have a past, even though his young teenage body could lead you to believe otherwise.
At the age of twenty you know how to refuse, especially when circumstances and your own desires give you a step back from social convention. Especially when you know that this society will never accept you for your ability to assimilate, but rather for your talent for protecting yourself from it.
Joël does not answer the question « what do you want to do ? » (with « when you grow up » implied). A question that negates the objects he creates now, as though he was being forgiven for his excesses in the belief that they are merely errors of youth or intuitive objects of chance conceived despite himself. True, Joël is starting out and his future will not necessarily be more inventive or mature or waning, like the market or museum preservation can judge for certain confirmed artists. Like many other people, Joël makes objects and his objects have the quality of invention and poetry. It’s a question of attitude more than career. And that is no doubt where the charm lies, like with Edouard Rajoana in a very different register.
Autodidact ? Objectively speaking, yes and no. After school he only went to the private Art School in Tana for three months, he hasn’t travelled any further than the neighbouring Ile de la Réunion and a very recent trip to Paris for three weeks. Research and a quest more than any kind of training, sharpened by constant experiments and his desire to always look at things with a new eye: in Christiane Ramanantsoa’s acting troupe where he acts and creates the costumes and sets; at the Adeva, a European Union project on design and craftwork, run by two French expatriates, Nadine and Pierre Paris, where he is a permanent consultant. He also has fun making jewellery out of strings and old iron, exhibiting in craft fairs without selling anything, decorating a nightclub or a flat, or being a performance designer by covering his models in earth.
He has few references. They are intuitive and constructed from the imagery taken from magazines and books from foreign cultural centres, friends, street scenes, town and village life: the cloths, forms, techniques, attitudes, smiles and anger of all those around him.
And this is the strange thing, or at least the kind of thing that seems to link up with what we saw in Cameroon, Dakar, Cuba and virtually every other country (but not wanting to make a theory out of it) : Joël’s production and artistic attitude are beyond space and within his own time and could just as easily come from a New Yorker, a Carioca, a Kinshasan or a Parisian. Without wanting to explain for the sake of explaining, one could think that this is a kind of proof that world urban culture is perhaps more constructed and real than we think, that human characters are so deep that no cultural specificity seems to be able to constrain them. And yet Tana could be out of this world with its standstill time, its urbanism, climate, peoples, traditions and way of life.
Beeing an artiste ...
Can one be the object of criticism, analysis or a biography at the age of twenty ? Is it rational to acclaim a young man who, driven by media attention, will think he is... what he isn’t or who will become what others would like him to be ? Consequentially, once the newborn flame has been blown out, disillusion and bitterness settle in the heart of the now cursed artist.
Not answering these questions is indispensable, for we are touching upon a double problem: firstly the problem of the nomenclature who fill artistic creation with codes : through the lack of confidence it has in each initiative or new desire - and the age of the initiator is now irrelevant - the society of experts, the media and « authorities » spends its time burying expressions on the pretext of passing them through the treadmill of time, its trends, a certain circle, the convention of pseudo-knowledge and normative training. Is it not possible to be the creator of a unique work with no antecedents and no continuation, to resume Julien Gracq’s anger ? Can we predict the future by analysis of the past alone ? Is it not possible to be a new man with each new project ?
Those who need curriculum vitae should stop reading now and await the improbable.
The second problem is the pressure which the art world exerts on artistic production that has to be inspired and fabulous. Without these epithets it does not even deserve to be registered in History or an art market: not taking into account the fundamentally humble and banal aspect of the artistic act. Transforming simple individualities into pseudo-geniuses, the weakest of whom will truly believe that is what they are. Being an artist is not a job or a career, even less a state, it is a society’s way of qualifying someone who once had the grace to charm or intrigue people with the things he made with his hands, words and body. Whatever the field, (writing, singing, painting, sets or costumes) the moment of creation is the moment when the very nature of the person living it blooms or materialises. The quality of this moment, the only important one, is not linked to its uniqueness or its being inscribed into any kind of continuity. Talking about Joël today means talking about Joël today. In his town, in what he brings to his sleeping world, with disconcerting appropriateness and freedom: design, direction, costumes, writing and above all a certain behaviour, an attitude that could be called poetic. He creates without trying to define himself as an artist or a designer. He creates for the fun of making, unmaking and remaking, endlessly inventing or borrowing from Madagascan forms.