DISCOVERIES SECTOR Booth 1C41, SECTOR ENCOUNTERS Booth EN5
Sabrina Amrani is pleased to announce the gallery's participation in Art Basel in Hong Kong 2019, with two booths at the fair with different presentations. In the Discoveries Sector, the gallery will present a solo show by Jong Oh, and in the Encounters sector it will present a monumental installation by Joël Andrianomearisoa. Sabrina Amrani is pleased to present “The Cartographies of Desire, the space between us", a solo presentation by Joël Andrianomearisoa (b. Antananarivo, 1977), for the Encounters sector of Art Basel in Hong Kong 2019.
Sometimes you have to forget, or, if you prefer, momentarily set aside the things you know – those acquired procedures and habits that we use to help us interpret an artwork. Any consideration of the issues Joël Andrianomearisoa raises in his work necessarily has to begin with the artist’s poetic imagination. Although his creations are not particularly challenging to analyse, the contrast between the specificity of the titles he chooses for his works and exhibitions and the all-embracing, opaque abstraction in which those same works operate seems somehow to suggest the existence of some undefined, perhaps inexplicable – and perhaps even impenetrable – tendency. It is as if we are looking at an encounter between two different entities.
Andrianomearisoa in no way attempts to approach abstraction through pictorial recreation of appropriation, or from a stance critical towards painting or abstraction. Abstraction is simply another element that helps us dissolve any sense of anticipation, any preliminary narrative. On that basis, Andrianomearisoa places us in a space and a situation that are both unpredictable, where any effort we might make to possess the work, to endow it with meaning as an end in itself, is constantly interrupted.
The project “The cartographies of Desire, the space between us” does not aspire to transmit a sense of anti-illusionism. Its aim is just the opposite. Here we are not looking at what would usually be considered the essential elements of painting – brush, paint and canvas – and there is no intention to engage with the practical techniques that have historically been used in abstract painting. Here, literality and minimalistic aspirations are present in appearance only. Indeed these works are more reminiscent of that type of formalist painting in which the artist would mentally immerse spectators in vast colour fields as a means of pushing them into a wholly fictitious space. What we are talking about, then, is a kind of distracting trick, manipulation or falsification within the work itself, in its execution, its crafting and its potential. But at first sight, the work offers no clue as to its meaning.
That is not to say that Andrianomearisoa’s work is self-referential or lays any claim to its own distinctive niche. Actually, the artist is not all that far from the “neo-conceptualists” and "neo-minimalists" of the late 1980s and 1990s, who emerged to challenge – among other things - subjectivism, emotionalism, and the heroic stance adopted by the “neoexpressionists”. Like them, Andrianomearisoa adopts abstraction to serve his own interests: abstraction is a vehicle. Moreover, Andrianomearisoa is fully aware that abstraction is a force which operates in both the economic and social spheres. For him, abstraction also creates potentially poetic images and can be used to address his own personal experience. The originality and the quest for the absolute which marked much of classical abstract art from Malevich through to Barnett Newman are here replaced by an ambiguity and an ambivalence that are never fully clarified. Andrianomearisoa seems not only to break free from the anguish of what has influenced him but also to assert his desire to expand his own visual language.
The disjuncture and the interruptions come into play precisely in this in-between space, between the work and “its references”, between the titles and “the work”, preventing us from grasping the artist’s imagination in a clear defined space. It is here where Joël Andrianomearisoa weaves together the ambiguities, contradictions and possibilities that endow his work with meaning and depth.
This project will be the last work to be shown in 2019 before Joël Andrianomearisoa's participation in the 58th Venice Biennale, representing Madagascar in its first-ever pavilion in the Biennale.

mpefm CHINA fair art press release