Joël Andrianomearisoa

Andrianomearisoa borrowed, for ‘Les saisons de mon coeur’, the title of a poem included in the book ‘Petals’. Malagasy writer, poet and critic, Élie-Charles Abraham, was a nostalgia activist, certainly resented about his exile when he wrote this compilation of poems in 1940. The book is divided into the seasons of the year and written in French after the decolonization of Madagascar. Nostalgia evokes the old Antananarivo under French occupation in poems that speak of seduction and sentimentality. In his texts, Abraham portrays the light as flower petals, delicate and always changing with the seasons, reactive to darkness and time. Andrianomearisoa took this as a starting point to conceive very personal artworks transcending autobiographical places and talking about the cycle of life and death that is renewed with the changing seasons: about light, darkness and time. The artist experiences for the first time with the embroidery in this series of small pieces that bear in their titles the name of the seasons. Made by local embroiderers, according to Joël’s designs, Andrianomearisoa left the color combinations at their choice, resulting in a work of accidental aesthetics on the different perceptions of time in this community, as in the work of the Malagasy poet.