Thu 8 Dec 2022 to Sat 28 Jan 2023
47, rue Saint-André des arts, 75006 Ymane Chabi-Gara: Un petit morceau d’étoffe violette
Tue-Sat 11am-7pm
Artist: Ymane Chabi-Gara
Another way of seeing
I love light colours. The colour of vines, soft green, the colour
"cherry blossom", the shade of "red plum blossom"
All pale colours are attractive. I like red, the colour "wisteria".
In summer, I favour purple; in autumn, the shade "parched moor".
I like skirts with ocean-coral patterns on them. Overskirts. In spring,
I like the shade "azalea", the colour "cherry blossom". In summer,
I like “green and dead-leaf" or "dead-leaf" coloured jackets.
— Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
It may seem surprising that Ymane Chabi-Gara has, for a long time now, used the hikikomori phenomenon which appeared in Japan in the 1990s as a thematic springboard for her painting. Hikikomori, which translates as 'pulling inward, being confined' in Japanese, is also known as a form of 'acute social withdrawal'. The condition affects teenagers and young adults unable to cope with the educational or professional world and who remain secluded in their homes. This phenomenon has generated abundant literature on the economic, social, cultural and psychiatric factors that come into play. Above all, it reflects a form of invisibility, since there are barely any requests for help and care. In recent years, however, this invisibility has been counteracted by photo and film documentaries which bear witness to the rich iconographic potential of the often cramped interior spaces in which people affected by the mysterious disorder isolate themselves. The accumulation of objects resulting from what can be compared to a Diogenes syndrome has provided Ymane Chabi-Gara with of a rich variety of patterns and designs. It is not so much the hikikomori and their various psychiatric conditions that interest her—at least not as far as her paintings are concerned, which tend to neutralise bodies and faces— as the compulsive hoarding that characterises those affected.
Ymane Chabi-Gara loves objects. She loves painting them even more. She selects them from shots gleaned from the Internet or from scenes photographed during her peregrinations across Tokyo. The hikikomori are not her only source of inspiration. She has also drawn on other environments saturated with material; second-hand clothes shops for example have provided inspiration for some of her most recent paintings. She alters or customizes the objects, sometimes even making them disappear and replacing them with others from her imagination. It becomes clear, when we follow the various processes to which Ymane Chabi-Gara subjects the objects she has photographed, that what really matters to her is to convert them into a painterly matter. To organise and structure the surface. To (re)negotiate the palette of colours. To trigger a transformation. Or rather transformations, given that the same motif can give rise to multiple variations and parallax effects that allow her to modify the configuration and the juxtapositions of the objects represented. In the manner, as it were, of a scene described from several points of view. One is reminded of Akira Kurosawa's Rashômon. And of all the works of art that teach us another way of seeing reality. A screen made from a single sheet. A three-legged screen. A highly decorated provisions bag. An umbrella.
— Erik Verhagen
YMANE CHABI-GARA is a painter born in Paris in 1986. She lives and works in Montreuil.
Graduated from La Cambre in Brussels in 2008 and the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2020, she was awarded several international prizes such as the International Grand Prix of the Takifuji Art Award, Japan, 2020, the Rose Taupin-Dora Bianka Prize as well as the Sisley Beaux-Arts de Paris Prize in 2021. She was nominated for the Reiffers Art Initiatives grant, and for the Révélations Emerige grant. Her work was exhibited in several collective exhibitions such as “Fireplaces” by the Révélations Emerige 2021 Grant in Paris and Toulon, the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Brussels and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Her first solo show was inaugurated as part of the Sisley Beaux-Arts de Paris pour la Jeune Création Prize in 2021. In 2022, she will participate in the “100% L’EXPO” exhibition, at La Villette, Paris.
Isolation, solitude, the body in relation to the world and to the condition of being social are the main subjects of Ymane Chabi-Gara’s paintings. They represent individuals, alone or in small groups, in universes and situations that mirror their interiority. Domestic spaces and industrial wastelands serve as a support for the narrative, guided by formal and colored impressions. At first, a very detailed drawing determines the structure of the composition. Then the experience of painting for its own sake, opens sensitive and pictorial possibilities. The body, always at the center of her preoccupations, serves as a point of convergence towards which all experience tends and finds meaning. The body of others but also, recently, her own body. This staging of herself touches on both the singularity of the intimate and the solitude as an archaic and universal feeling.