“it was a scorching day, a day that was blue all by”, we will learn within the opening paragraphs of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, written in 1932. In accordance with the creator, it’s his most poetic novel. A dystopic story during which the primary character—a prisoner ready for his sentence to be carried out—invents an imaginary world made up of metaphors and allusions. Through which a day can grow to be blue, a jailer can waltz and a spider can speak. The novel’s controversial finish means that the prisoner escapes from being executed due to his creativeness, which transports him on a journey between time and house. Azar Nafisi analysed this e-book in her autobiographical novel, Studying Lolita in Tehran (2002). Whereas educating western literature on the College of Tehran throughout the 1979 revolution, she extolled the energy of fiction and its transcendent energy. She wrote how, underneath a regime that annihilates metaphors and allusions, the understanding of tales and of literature withers away. Fiction turns into flat and banal within the service of a trigger and the nuances of narrative disappear.

Daring to put down a picture, to carry actuality at a distance, to liberate your self from it or deny it are all ways in which artists have created with the intention to be free. Fiction persists in artworks regardless of the chaotic confusion of recent knowledge, and regardless of a perpetual and monotonous din. Tales, metaphors and imaginary tales lie on the coronary heart of this exhibition.

Intergalactic worlds, drawing their references from all types of cultures, function in Inès di Folco Jemni’s canvases. In her oil work, highlighted with Venetian turpentine and glitter, imaginary characters seem, with feminine traits, travelling in a fictional, indeterminate house. Particulars of cities with medieval architectures, magical, sometimes-carnivorous flowers, fairies, and dense, mauve sunsets will be glimpsed. The ambiance of a sacred ceremony proliferates, wavering between Message, Memento and Médina.

In his sculptures, Ladji Diaby creates a brand new, extremely private language, linked to his house surroundings, in a direct relationship together with his origins. There may be all the time a query of objects and pictures, which he makes use of as transfers—a method he exploits in his work to talk of spirituality, feelings, emotions and idols, but additionally of the absurdity of official, imposed narratives.

Tomasz Kowalski’s work oscillates freely between completely different eras and types within the historical past of artwork, whereas producing an iconography during which his personal, fragmented creativeness can evolve. He destroys the hierarchy between sleep, dreaming and wakefulness whereas celebrating the liberty of the unconscious. His characters typically appear to fade into depths of color. In collaboration together with his mom, the textile artist Alicja Kowalska, Tomasz Kowalski has additionally developed a tapestry follow.

There was a lot speak of the apocalyptic aesthetic of Cezary Poniatowski’s works in reduction, fabricated from imitation leather-based, carpets, extruded polystyrene or insulation foam. That is science fiction conveyed by types and objects typically codified as coming from Jap Europe. By way of the prism of reminiscence, symbols and a sardonic sense of humour, these reliefs describe a technocratic world, awaiting transformation.

In Peng Zuqiang’s movie The Cyan Backyard, 2022, collective historical past and private tales intertwine. The picture rotates round a former clandestine radio station, lively from 1969 to 1981, now supposedly a resort. “Voice of the Malayan Revolution” will be heard earlier than the protagonist flips the change to pick out a romantic tune and proceed cleansing an Airbnb condominium, with a conventional décor, someplace, in one other city, drifting between the previous and the current.

Taking part artists:
Ladji Diaby, Inès di Folco Jemni, Tomasz Kowalski, Cezary Poniatowski, Peng Zuqiang

at Crèvecœur, Paris
till April 13, 2024