Lalalande – Galerie La La Lande

"Requiem 2.0" de Sépànd Danesh et "Domus Vacue" de Solène Ortoli à la galerie La La Lande

Requiem 2.0

A Franco-Iranian artist who experienced exile in childhood, Sépànd Danesh finds refuge, through his painting, in the geometric representation of an angle. At the intersection of two walls lies an interval — a corner in which to withdraw, rebuild an identity, and arrange childhood memories. Within this contained space, a dead end with a closed horizon, the artist nonetheless discovers infinity. It is crossed by a vertical line that simultaneously cleaves the space in a fracture and points toward the promise of reconstruction.
Here, the destruction evoked is that of Pablo Picasso's Guernica, reconsidered through the lens of Sépànd's digital and tragicomic aesthetic, and through that of the new warmongering forces that have continued to crush the innocent to this day. To the bodily deformity and fragmentation of Picasso's figures, expressing the atrocity of their suffering, Sépànd adds their pixelated fragmentation: a contemporary equivalent of Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dot, which, through the printing grid of comics, expressed the disintegration of the individual.
In Sépànd's work, bodies thus decomposed by the pixel convey a new form of misfortune visited upon the wounded today: their media disintegration, here literally digital. The reality of their suffering is denied by the camera and its operator, who averts their gaze and redirects their attention toward the trivial ; three floating pixels, admittedly in attractive but primary colors, forming no intelligible image.
Fragments burst out of the main canvas and take the form of autonomous elements: glitches, or digital display errors. The work thus overflows its frame, in a logic analogous to the parergon described by Jacques Derrida, whereby peripheral elements participate fully in the construction of meaning. These graphic artefacts extend the fragmentation by dispersing certain details into an isolated visual space, where the figures seem simultaneously to decompose and reconfigure themselves, far from the site of their torment.

Aurélien Simon

Domus Vacuae

Solène Ortoli draws figurative yet irrational spaces — plunging views whose perspectives compete with one another — in which nature seems to domesticate both places and bodies.
Vacant houses, yet inhabited by an inversion of the domestication process; it is now nature that transforms human habitat, through its grassy and arboreal irruption. Interior and exterior blur into a dialogue of forms and colours. Greenery makes its way indoors, while the outside is furnished with domestic objects. The two spaces communicate through an absence of partition walls, or through large bay windows behind which the intimacy of the figures is exposed by the transparency of the spaces.
These figures explore their animal origins, visited here by a simian silhouette, there caressing a fluid and spectral ichthyic form, or bathing in a liquid element as if to return to the source of a forgotten nature lying in the depths. Others drift in ambiguity: mermaids frozen mid-transition, held in a passage between their two states — animal and human — and their two distinct realms — the world above and the world below — connected by baths resembling burial vaults.
These water surfaces reflect another world, as do the monolithic beds — that threshold between dream and waking — and the inclined mirrors that open as many loopholes toward an inverted world, much like the "House of the Mirror" of Lewis Carroll's Alice. With the mirror, Solène handles reflection as a material, giving shape to unsuspected landscapes. This mirror transforms and deepens our reality, overturns its horizon, and reveals to our eyes the image of our own deeper nature.

Aurélien Simon