Mariam Abouzid Souali, Stardust: we are nothing but...
Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, September 7th - October 7th, 2023, Paris
With the Stardust exhibition, painter Mariam Abouzid Souali approaches a new cycle – although doubtless not the last – in a broader reflection on the place of the individual within globalization. A place which is negotiated, with difficulty and at great cost, for the citizen of the Global South, often embodied in Mariam’s imposing paintings, allowing us to measure ourselves with many figures (hand games, eye contacts) but also with a multi-perspective space in which her societal frescoes take form [...]
The figure of the child (or the adolescent) that populates almost all of Abouzid Souali's works also takes on a new dimension in her latest productions and for the Stardust exhibition. The child generally takes on the double mask of innocence and knowledge (the one who wanders and seeks to know in the same movement). Not established or encyclopedic knowledge but the paths of intuition and becoming, the pure and disinterested experience embodied by the incorruptible child. Like the angels in Italian Renaissance painting, the children portrayed by Abouzid Souali do not have assigned functions but can take on roles (the orator, the musician, the merciful...) and above all manage to bring their inquisitive gaze to places not everyone goes (they wander more or less aimlessly, sometimes focused on a game, sometimes left to their own devices).
However, the Stardust exhibition and the paintings presented make this child a high-level athlete, capable of overcoming mountains and touching the stars; not to say superheroes, where, indeed, the first paintings of Abouzid Souali showed us rather anti-heroes or children with toys. The rowers, the footballers, the slender bodies in weightlessness and dedicated to surpassing themselves in the high jump, the long jump and the hurdle race, are projected at the peak of their physical effort, as in a vortex mixing the earth, the sea and the sky. [...]
Excerpt from the text by Morad Montazami (director of Zamân Books & Curating) [...]
