Winner of the 2022 Emerige Revelations grant, fresh out of the Beaux-Arts de Paris where, after literary studies and two master's degrees in history, she studied under Djamel Tatah, Dora Jeridi certainly deserved the exhibition dedicated to her by the Mor Charpentier gallery: following her participation in the exhibition "Figurations. Another Art of Today" last summer (see Acumen no 352), we rediscovered all the fervor of a brushstroke as vibrant as it was inspired.
"I think art is an intensification of reality," the laureate (born in 1988) told us at the opening of the "Figurations" exhibition last May. In one of the two works she exhibited there, The Poisonous HarvestIn the past, a young woman resembling him was depicted slumped on a chair beside a dead horse surrounded by three pools of color—green, blue, and red—standing out against the raw canvas. Today, these pools have become explosions, sometimes reduced to mere scratches or drips, traces, or spreading across the entire surface of the canvas, ablaze with incandescent yellows and reds. After the garish pinks and strident yellows that "pierced" his early paintings, here comes the conflagration. The conflagration and the eruption. A flood of enigmatic images and signs, a chaos of lines and stains, of faces and fragments of bodies, of cries and grimaces: ruins, visions, reminiscences?...
What are we to see in these saturated, almost graffiti-like paintings, often mixing oil paint and charcoal, sometimes enhanced with spray paint? Nightmares, as some titles would seem to suggest: Mouth Raid, Death Star, Dangerous Dusk, or, Pony Club (Guernica for Kids) ? ...
A tragicomic chaos
In Inner Bang, A screaming red face bursts forth, along with a hand, from a shapeless, golden-yellow mass. A face and a hand reappear, this time accompanied by a body clad in an armor-dress. Dangerous Dusk II, while in Concrete Anger, They are very succinctly sketched and colored: resulting from a grotesque distortion, "the cry becomes a grimace" 1 "...We sense here that a drama is unfolding without being able to determine either its origin or its object. “Painting allows me to express a latent violence. Some autobiographical events are unspeakable and lead to the need to paint.” the artist confided to Guy Boyer in Knowledge of the arts in 2022. "In my paintings, there is meaning, but a meaning that is illegible, incomprehensible. There is a narrative, but it remains enigmatic." she clarified, while explaining that she prioritizes sensations. Sensations and an "atmosphere of crisis" that appear amplified tenfold in her latest works, as if there were an urgency to paint the "real current threat." 2 ».
"impact surface"
For Dora Jeridi, painting is indeed an "impact surface." And "it has to pulse." 3 “Like in a piece of music, the tempo and the techniques must vary: blending the muted matte quality of charcoal drawing with the brilliance and density of oil paint, from highly graphic, precisely drawn sections to more abstract or spontaneous touches, she seeks to create different planes and rhythms to break the flat, inert surface of the canvas, to infuse it with speed, vitality, and bite.” Multiplying pictorial references (here, The Flayed Ox by Rembrandt, there, the horse of Guernica…) and cinematographic, she insolently mixes registers, superimposing the tragic register with the grotesque and “cartoonish” register of certain figures or details.
And so, through a tumble of legs and feet straight out of comics, she transforms Guernica in a "buffoonish battle scene" without, however, diminishing its aggressive charge and "explosive dynamic".
“Figurations. Another Art of Today,” Maison Caillebotte in Yerres, May-October 2023
Interview conducted on December 19, 2023.
“Concrete Fear – Dora Jeridi”
Mor Charpentier Gallery
61, rue de Bretagne, Paris 3e
Until January 6, 2024
Upcoming exhibition at the Perrotin Gallery in New York in January 2025
