Keeping Faith, Keeping Drawing

Analix Forever

November 29, 2019 - January 31, 2020

Curator: Barbara Polla

 

You can find the catalog at this link:

www.amazon.com/dp/B08CHMG45N

www.amazon.fr/dp/B08CNJKD8K

 

mounir fatmi’s drawings might still remain confidential, they are nonetheless fundamental. The artist is widely renowned for his large-scale installations, his sculptures and now also for his videos and photographs, but he has always been drawing. Not only that – some of his drawing date back to 1995 and 1996, but the artist, often critical of his own work, has discarded many of them – the ones that remain, therefore particularly precious, touch upon the fundamental themes in Mounir Fatmi’s work: scissors, cutting, whether of the umbilical cord or of the tongue and language; amputation, cultural rupture, the necessity to create new connections in order to survive; and finally transplants, whether physical, bodily or cultural. Fatmi says: “You will find in there a mutilated and recomposed body, like an apparition; a body with no legs, a leg found in another drawing and an umbilical cord that connects bodies; and many details that can be found in my videos.”

The combination of the three colors red, white and black is typical of mounir fatmi’s drawings. They tend to form a chromatic code both symbolic and emotional. Red: the link; white: forgetfulness; black: the hope of giving an at least temporary form to unstable and fragile graphic appearances, sometimes close to evanescence: thus, in Animation (a series of drawings initiated in 1998), fine silhouettes of migratory storks and various names of countries are superimposed on series of curves and loops such as cables or umbilical cords. Red, white and black.

Since 2015, fatmi has been considering drawing as an intense activity that develops itself around its essential work themes: migration, exile, identity, the body, in particular with the series The Island Of Roots. The series All Connected and White Matter are also materializations of fatmi obsessions: fragility, links, connections, our brain … white matter transmits nerve impulses and spreads information in the nervous system; the myelin surrounding the axons is responsible for the rapid conduction of the electrical signal. White matter is already the subject of a book: the book, so fragile, so multiple, also fundamental to mounir fatmi and which transmits information since human history exists.

Drawing is the basis of everything, Giacometti asserted; fatmi tells us that the link is the basis of the drawing, this link that perpetuates faith, thanks to the pencil.

 

Barbara Polla, November 2019