Opening reception on Thursday, September 5, 6–9 pm
Exhibition from September 5 to October 19, 2024
Closed from September 24 to October 4, 2024
For his first 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 emerges in the darkness and caresses the rough skin of a citrus fruit, the viscose of tracksuits, the rocky surface of a ruin, the folds of a sheet, or the cavernous grooves of a shell. It illuminates objects, bodies, and situations brought to their peak. It ignites the landscape, dramatizes figures and portraits, while highlighting the silence of things depicted here through painting or drawing.
Jérémie Cosimi’s new works, conceived for his first solo exhibition at the Les filles du calvaire gallery, unfold a fragmented narrative made of flashes and gaps. Without subscribing to a determined and grandiose storyline, it anchors itself in an intimate relationship with the subjects represented. These subjects emerge from the artist’s daily life and are transposed through staging into spaces with sometimes uncertain localities. At the edge of a scene indicated by a drape, on a fragment of a column, at the onset of a dark background, on the smooth surface of a table, they write a poetic and sometimes choreographic sentence with their presence. The subjects often echo short stories or long poems written by the artist, which elude our reading. For the intention is not to provide something to read but to see. These words then subtly nourish his approach and inspire gestures that gradually become scenes. Photography captures the composition before painting transfigures the image. These translation operations do not encrypt the reference. On the contrary, these steps allow for the synthesis of things, crystallizing their essence.
From large formats to miniatures, Jérémie Cosimi delineates a universe that is both strange and familiar. He maintains a direct proximity to the subjects he represents, while displacing them into liminal and often anachronistic places. The tight framing and the simplicity of the settings blur the sense of temporality. It is then a matter of considering the capacity of objects and bodies to traverse time. The depicted elements thus become archetypes that question the persistences and variations that flow through our history. Using chiaroscuro, reinvesting the genre scene or the still life is a way to weave forms of heritage; to delve into the present in the same way as the past, and to make emerge, from seemingly mundane things, immutable forms. Savoring a slice of melon with one’s eyes, confronting the interlacing of bodies and folds, plunging one’s gaze into a distant horizon appear as so many invitations to invest the banal and the known to affirm their importance, even their extraordinariness. Each work thus becomes a fragment, not of a univocal narrative, but of shared individual and collective memories."
— Thomas Fort, art critic
