Suns and Nights

Performance on Saturday, October 19, starting at 4 PM

Exhibition from September 5 to October 19, 2024

Closed from September 24 to October 4, 2024

For his first solo exhibition at the gallery, from September 5 to October 19, 2024, the Marseille-based artist Jérémie Cosimi skillfully juxtaposes ancestry and modernity in an exhibition entitled "Des soleils et des nuits" ("Suns and Nights").

"A light bloom in the darkness and caresses the rough skin of a citrus fruit, the viscose of tracksuits, the rocky surface of a ruin, the pleating of a sheet or the cavernous furrows of a shell. It sheds light on objects, bodies, situations pushed to their climax. Sets the landscape on fire, dramatizes the figures and portraits as she underlines the silence of things here translated by painting or drawing. In chiaroscuro, it fascinates as much as it radiates, creating an uncertain atmosphere, swinging between day and night, between the humid heat of summer and the comfort of a brazier. 

Jérémie Cosimi’s new art works, created for his first’s personal exposition at Galerie Les filles du calvaire, unfold a scattered story, made up of wrecks and absences. Without being part of a determined and pompous narrative, it is anchored in an intimate relationship with the subjects represented. The latter often echo short stories or long poems written by the artist, which escape our reading. His intention is not to give us something to read but rather being capable to see. These words implicitly irrigate his approach and inspire gestures that gradually become stages. The photograph captures the composition before the painting transfigures the image. However, these translation operations do not encrypt the referent. On the contrary, these steps make it possible to synthesize things, to crystallize their essence. The painter's predilection for miniatures, without this format being exclusive, complemented by a marked interest in the variable texture of his supports, adds value to the precious character he confers on his subjects.

The bodies and objects represented come from the artist's daily life, implicitly relating a lived proximity, without tipping over into autobiography. Transposed through the prism of staging, then painting, they are revealed outside their original context. They arise within settings that are often made up of a small number of elements. In front of a drapery, on a fragment of a column, at the beginning of a dark background, on the smooth top of a table, the figures and things depicted write by their presence a poetic and in places choreographic sentence. The closed interiors, the darkness of certain backgrounds and the shallow depth of field often favoured in compositions, while preserving a degree of privacy, put the subjects under tension. This play with scenic codes responds to the theatre of the world, its beauty and its dramas. It opens up a reflection on the foundations of our societies as a reminder of the multiple layers and ruptures that underlie them. Bodies and objects then unfold like uneasy tightrope walkers on a taut line where the past and the present intertwine.

From large formats to miniatures, Jérémie Cosimi defines a cosmos that is both strange and familiar. While representing what is close to him and contemporary, the painter likes to shape liminal and often anachronistic places. The polished technique touching on hyperrealism makes the subjects immediately identifiable. However, the tight framing and the purity of the sets blur the relationship with temporality. From the work on the contrasting values of light and shadow that borrows from the Baroque, to the work on the gestures of the figures that evokes Mannerism, among others, a form of continuity with the history of Western painting is manifested. It is then a question of considering the capacity of objects and bodies to travel through time. These elements become archetypes that question the persistences and variations that irrigate the course of our history. Using chiaroscuro, reinvesting the genre scene or the still life is a way of weaving forms of heritage; of digging into the present in the same way as the past and of making immutable forms emerge from things that are a priori innocuous.

Navigating between the genders and references the artist decompartmentalizes the registers and suggests that we activate what Pierre Wat called "an archeologist’s eye^[1] ". For the art historian, it is a question of analysing the layers that shape nineteenth-century landscape paintings in order to understand that history is not only played out in the eventful nature of a significant event, but thatit can rustle just as much in its margins as in what remains. In doing so, he reveals the ability of landscape painting, from Friedrich to Turner, to take over from history painting. Painting the insignificant can also be thought of in a similar way. Siri Hustvedt thus conceives of still life as "the art of attaching oneself to snippets and pieces of life^[2]" and considers the pictorial translation of vernacular things as a means of conferring dignity on them. From Chardin to Cotán, the ordinary thus becomes extraordinary without falling into the side of spectacle. Jérémie Cosimi's still lifes, portraits and landscapes then act as "remainders of the contemporary^[3]". While bearing witness to our current world, the unity of the touch and the chromatic palette playing with classical codes attests to a sought-after historical anchorage. Fragments of micro-narratives, his works reveal that the common makes history.

Tasting a slice of melon with one's eyes, confronting the intertwining of bodies and folds, plunging one's gaze into a distant horizon appear as so many invitations to invest in the banal and the known in order to affirm its importance. Each work thus becomes a fragment no longer of an unequivocal narrative, but of individual and collective memories shared here."

— Thomas Fort, art critic