Category Archives: Exhibitions

The expressions and emotions of Alyaa Kamel

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Alyaa Kamel 1

I get a message from Facebook: the 13th November is Alyaa Kamel’s birthday. Another message tells me it is the first day of her new exhibition. Galerie Cimaise has risen to the challenge of showing her “Expressions and Emotions.” Go to this exhibition. Do not expect to see representations of people’s expressions and emotions. You will find Alyaa Kamel’s people but the expressions and emotions are all hers. This is, after all, #alyaakamel: emoting on-line and “out there.”

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A large canvas reveals her fascination for tagging. It is a crush of hopeless, expressionless people: her main theme. I remain convinced that her inspiration is driven by the all-too-frequent images from daily news: thousands of poor middle-eastern souls in crisis. I try to nail down her thoughts. She cleverly responds in a meaningful abstractness. With a gush of words, she throws ideas at me such as humanity, inheritance, memories and genes. I push…. “We all have our secrets, Robin!”

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Another large canvas moves the theme to the individual. The face is grotesque and haunting. One eye is closed. The nose is broken. The lips are mashed. In describing what was in her mind when covering it with glue and kitchen film she loses me. I see only an attempt to obliterate one of those poor middle-eastern souls in crisis; only this time the crisis has been meted out at a personal level. By my interpretation, this is the battered and bruised face of the final interrogation.

This exhibition carries 36 pieces. Alyaa’s expressions and emotions may be elusive but she has a lot to say and she says it better with her drawings and paintings than with her words. The ensemble of the person and her work is contemporary, enigmatic and intriguing. A visit to Galerie Cimaise will not disappoint.

The Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours exhibition at MAH

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Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours 1I meet Philippa Kundig at Geneva’s Museum of Art and History. She is the designer of the current exhibition featuring one of this town’s most famous painters: the eighteenth-century neo-classicist, Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours (1752-1809.) And what a monumental, beautiful exhibition it is! If you like to feast on representation of the classics, the team at MAH serves up Saint-Ours’s full menu of Homer, Olympic games (the original!), Spartans, Cupid and Psyche along with dozens of his meticulous portraits.

Such an important exhibition occupies Philippa and the two curators, Anne de Herdt and Lurence Madeline for more than six months. The works have to be sourced, borrowed and transported. Historical research, deciding on sub-themes, writing the panels and brochures, designing the display, building partitions, printing the materials, lighting the space and finally hanging the pictures are all requisite steps towards what confronts me today.

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The resulting presentation of the works is stunning. Here, by incorporating a vertical break in one of the rich, plum-coloured partitions, Philippa draws the visitor’s eye into the next space, across a rare Saint-Ours sculpture of two naked men wrestling and then on to an Olympian scene where a victorious wrestler is supporting his vanquished foe before the tribune.

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The life and work of Saint-Ours is squarely placed in the Enlightenment. He was profoundly influenced by Geneva’s foremost philosopher of the day, Jean Jacques Rousseau. The painter’s father is said to have possessed a collection of Rousseau’s publications. In one side-room, Philippa shows me a unique, academic and complete body of work. It comprises small oil paintings of scenes from Rousseau’s “The Levite of Ephraim” paired with corresponding ink sketches. Each pair merits minute examination. Tempus fugit!

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“Le Tremblment de terre: version monumentale” 1783 – 1799. Oil on canvas.

The signature painting of the exhibition is a large-scale version of “The Earthquake.” (Saint-Ours painted four smaller versions.) The motivation for this imposing work came with news of a massive earthquake in Messina, Italy in 1783. A family flees the destruction of their home. They look to the heavens as if expecting to find a reason for this punishment. The woman with her terribly vulnerable – possibly dead – baby are centre-stage. Powerful stuff!

Indeed, these were turbulent times. France was in political upheaval and Geneva had its own revolution in 1792. Saint-Ours maintained a fascination for people caught up in cataclysmic and violent events as evidenced by his sketch-book from around that time. My mind automatically makes a link to the paintings of Tahar M’Guedmini depicting the moment when catastrophe hits…… “when time faints.”

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Sketch for “Le Tremblement de terre.”

Needless to say, some of Saint-Ours’s exquisite sketches on this theme are positioned near the final work. This part of the exhibition seems so compelling. Is this because it resonates with current events? I guess that if Saint-Ours was painting today, this is how he would portray heart-rending scenes from the current migrant crisis in Europe. Were subliminal influences from daily news playing on the minds of the curators when conceiving this show and deciding on the signature work?

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Study for “Choix des enfants de Sparte” 1789. Oil on canvas.

Saint-Ours trained at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. For all the splendour of this exhibition, let’s not lose sight of the fact that he was a true master of his chosen medium. I find myself riveted by the sobre concentration on these men’s faces. And this painting was just a study for a bigger, harrowing canvas of the Spartan elders choosing which children would live to be good citizens and which would be left to die.

So…. Bravo MAH! And…. Brava, Philippa!  Many thanks for the private tour of your work-place. I take my leave and enjoy a breath of fresh air. Right in front of MAH, welcoming me back to the crisp October daylight, is my favourite public sculpture in Geneva – Henry Moore’s “Reclining Figure: Arch Leg.” I run my hand over the super-smooth bronze and can’t help wondering how a MAH exhibition designer would display Moore’s work in 200 years.

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Henry Moore “Reclining Figure: Arch Leg.” Bronze 1969.

Tahar M’Guedmini at Galerie Cimaise

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I miss the opening of Tahar M’Guedmini’s “Les syncopes du temp” exhibition. Two days later, the impeccable exhibition space of Galerie Cimaise is empty and quiet. An impressive triptych catches my eye and kicks me in the guts. Why does my pulse quicken?

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The large canvases in this exhibition run with a common and, at first, puzzling theme. A man sits alone at a coffee table near a window with curtain. But something happens to throw everything into movement. There are dark, chaotic and instantaneous forces at play in the frame and in the world outside.

Too often, I have been near to explosions. F***k! That was close! Within a second, the organism is caught in fright and flight. Nausea-curl-up-in-a-ball-and-hide. Is this why, standing in Galerie Cimaise, I feel distress and a giddy isolation? Or is it a kind of all-possible-bad-news-arriving-now moment? Has M’Guedmini captured this instinctive reaction on canvas?

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Tahar M’Guedmini was born in Tunisia in 1948. He trained in fine arts in Tunis and in Paris. Over forty years, he has exhibited widely in Great Britain, Switzerland and France. He remains domiciled in Djerba, Tunisia. In the paintings on show here, it is unclear who the central figure is or what M’Guedmini might have experienced himself to portray the instantaneous upheaval of his solitaire. Whether or not I like these paintings is immaterial; aesthetic appeal is secondary. Quite simply, they have an extraordinary impact. A strong parallel and almost certain influence is the work of Francis Bacon. No surprise then that one of M’Guedmini’s works is now housed in the British Museum’s section on Modern Art from the Arab World.

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Is this dark figure running for cover after the impact? Mourad Ghedira, the mastermind behind this exhibition, gives us some relief from the anxiety of the overbearing canvases by interspacing some beautiful water colour and pastel sketches. Although just as mysterious and hunting around the same theme, they serve to lighten my mood.

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Perhaps the best translation of “Les syncopes du temps” would be “When time faints”? This powerful exhibition forces a sober recollection of the occasions when my time fainted.