Brigitte Aubignac, Ymane Chabi-Gara, Marc Desgrandchamps, Tim Eitel and Djamel Tatah, five painters working in France brought together around the theme of solitary figures: this is the magnificent exhibition that we are given to see this summer at the Lee Ufan Foundation in Arles.

What do the solitary figures painted by Tim Eitel or Djamel Tatah and a stone placed on a glass or metal plate by the Korean artist Lee Ufan have in common? Emptiness. This emptiness, which in Djamel Tatah's 2022 painting Untitled occupies three-quarters of the canvas, composed of a large blue background framed on either side by a male figure and a column; similarly, in Tim Eitel's 2006 painting Tür [Gate], which presents a large gray rectangle facing a female figure…

A disturbing mise en abyme (the large grey rectangle echoing the grey clutch held by the young woman) obstructs the pictorial space, while in another painting by the German artist, the large yellow circle seems to represent an opening towards infinity.
A man is shown walking with his back to the camera. The confrontation of the human figure with the order of geometry, through its very nakedness and neutrality, exacerbates the feeling of isolation and silence. " explains art historian Philippe Dagen, curator of the exhibition. Tatah's standing male and female figures give the impression of facing, alone, a world and a time of which, so to speak, they do not truly belong. They are separated from it, as they are from the colors in front of which they stand: a distance that one senses is insurmountable. The sensation is just as intense—and sometimes painful—in Eitel's canvases, which depict the impossibility of communication. Both Eitel and Tatah "express" solitude through the suppression of the surrounding world. »

Brigitte Aubignac and Ymane Chabi-Gara, on the other hand, situate their solitary figures in the oppressive disorder of everyday life: an unmade sofa in Green Insomnia, an avalanche of papers on and under a desk of suffering (Hikikomori 6, 2020) 1…It is in confinement, in the saturation of space, that solitude instills its poison here. Floating in a blurred space and time, Marc Desgrandchamps' isolated characters,
As for them, they seem to exist between several realities, between the tangible and the intangible. Often translucent, traversed by the underlying landscapes or obscured by dead branches, they appear impenetrable. Like ghosts wandering in a strangely insubstantial world, they exhale, in their evanescence, a pervasive and acrid scent of solitude.

1 Hikikomori in Japanese refers to women or men, usually teenagers or young adults, who live secluded in their homes for months or years, refusing all social contact.

CATALOGUE PUBLISHED BY MARTIN DE HALLEUX EDITIONS
WITH TEXTS BY PHILIPPE DAGEN AND LEE UFAN
"SOLO FIGURES" LEE UFAN ARLES
5, RUE VERNON, ARLES
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 24, 2023
LEEUFAN-ARLES.ORG