À Corps perdu

A Corps perdu

curatorial statement by Marie Tomb

With an impetuous, unconditional energy, À Corps perdu considers the uneasy experience of inhabiting our bodies and encountering those of others. Sirine Germani and Shawki Youssef bring forth the tension between abandonment and immersion in the world with human figures surrendering to the painterly landscape. They highlight the perpetual cultural, emotional, and political significance of the human body, by excavating its multiple layers of meaning, oscillating between loss and intense engagement, and alluding to its struggling to attain elusive peace.

The artists explore worlds, somewhere between the body as flesh and the body as myth, and uncover connections between humanity and the natural world, swiping the body from under sociocultural and political pressure to bring it back closer to its original environment. Organic and inorganic matter, from flowers in bloom to pebbles to vast fields evoking sea, sand and fertile fields, merge with the remnants of who we are.

Germani and Youssef underscore the deep-seated human need for physical connection, with bodies that become, simultaneously more tactile, bloodier, more spread around, more crushed under pressure, and folded over many times. Yet the familiar is more hypothetical, tentative and scared than ever, as we’re riding on an infinite scroll of bodies inviting instinctual emotional reactions, and facile armchair commentary, judging with eyes and ears from a comfortable distance, swiping, clicking and changing the channel at will, snugly removed from touch and smell.

Germani exudes raw feelings, as she breathes intensity into each figure while mutilating them systematically – yet they resist with melancholy or rage, their emotions heightened, pulsating with a passion stopped in its tracks. She reforms them with a feminine eye, conscious of emphasizing the violence exerted upon the body in its stereotypical representations and demanding an end to suffering. Inorganic elements standing for the male gaze appear as traces, their trajectory frozen as they crystallize on the works’ surface.

Youssef tones down emotion in his post-human landscapes-cum-bodies that dissolve boundaries between flesh and nature. In his universe, organic forms morph into topographical features, blurring the lines between the tangible and the ghostly, and between painting and sculpture. He emphasizes the fragility of matter with his rough, layered, and folded surfaces seeping into one another, evoking a sense of History and transformation, a quiet process of aging and renewal where animal, vegetal, and mineral realms become one.

In À Corps perdu, the layering, erasing and rebuilding the human form weave stories of disintegration and reconstruction, and of change and continuity. These could be an echo of the patterns that plague our country, or perhaps a call to a less hastily judgmental consideration of the bodies whose images we consume faster and less carefully than we believe.