Les agglomérations

Galerie B-312 will host from September 9 to October 14, 2006 Les agglomérations de Martin Désilets. The work consists of digital prints of photographs taken in 2001 and 2002 in Beirut and its surroundings, postcards of Lebanon with oriental decorative motifs, and small paintings referring to pivotal moments of modernity or sometimes summed up in a monochrome texture.The artist said: " Les agglomérations are inspired by a territory marked by the stigma of violence and war: Beirut and Lebanon. During the civil war in Beirut, this is how the demarcation line between the western and eastern sides of the city was designated. Violence and war are thus evoked here above all through a presence-absence, or more precisely by an absence of any direct reference... and by the subtraction of any green line, as much in the photographs as in the painted elements. From a philosophical point of view, there is in this gesture at the same time all the symbolic force of art, as well as its incapacity - and mine - to induce a change (in the) real... its terrible emptiness. » The work does not testify, does not judge, does not veil what it shows behind a mask of beauty or behind any formalism. This work is more simply a poem, that is to say a threshold beyond which nothing is as we thought it would be - In the agglomerations, shapes, patterns, colours and textures call out to each other, respond to each other and rhyme with each other. There is an order, a harmony even. And then, the building staggers, the links give way. Nothing collapses, however. On the contrary, the work is consolidated. The meaning we thought we had found in it loses its logic before an even more logical one. Dare we recognize here what Romain Gary described in his time as follows: "Until we recognize that inhumanity is a human thing, we'll remain in a pious lie" (Les Cerfs-Volants, Gallimard, 1980)?

Translation of a texte by Jean Émile Verdier