EXHIBITION /// GALLERIES PARIS
Teodora Gallery
October 14th > November 16th
Sébastien Mehal : Men and cities
Sébastien Mehal’s work tells us about the modern human condition in the contemporary urban space. A theme that has often nourished the real estate projects previously led by the gallerist Hanna Ouaziz. In October, the Teodora gallery gives carte blanche to the artist who, with Anna Sansom as co-curator, offers the conceptual expression, through a series of monochromes … In the century of infernal cadence as since always, the city is a social laboratory, giving to see the good and the bad of the human nature. The city, both created to gather men, develop their savoir vivre and protect them from natural disasters, is also the place of aggression due to the problems of sharing space. It then inspires a double movement of attraction and repulsion. It is this duality that the work of Sébastien Mehal expresses. On the one hand, there is the violence of the way, the use of syringes giving an effect of uncontrolled, incisive spurt to the work, and expressing the oppression of the lost beings in this unbridled urbanization. On the other, the infinity of the color, the feeling of fullness and appeasement exhaled by the monochrome.
“Suprematism is the semaphore of color in the unlimited,” said Malevich, and the pure color surfaces of Mehal echo it. Just as the Suprematists sought to translate the infinity of space in their straight lines and right angles, Sébastien Mehal has rhythmic compositions, all in vertical and horizontal. But this aesthetic is not devoid of any identifiable subject: the serigraphs of Portraits inscribed transparently on the canvas bring it closer to figuration, as much as they raise the question of the anonymity of the individual in the big city. This acute relationship to urbanity is also reflected in the use of industrial materials, including a paint consisting of pigments from the automotive industry or graphic aluminum structures evoking scaffolding. Passionate traveler born in Martinique, Mehal travels the continents to meet the men and women who inspire his work. It evolves in the heart of modern frenzy to take the pulse of contemporary reality. An architect by training, his works presented at the Teodora gallery are made from architectural drawings mixing several cities. Canada, Tokyo, New York or Paris amalgamate into a whole, fruit of the imagination. A miscegenation of cities that echoes the miscegenation of his serigraphed portraits, both similar and unique, inviting us to look at man in his universality and no longer according to this particular trend of humanity to territorialism …
Emma Noyant
