Sultana
Contrasting Claracq’s solemnity, Matthias Garcia’s artificial paradises of flowers, carnations, and sirens unfold in a gentle but intrusive rejection of the absolute. It manifests a world that does not yet exist but patiently figurates in nuanced colors of nebulous fabrications. His aesthetic invokes a world of possibilities, in a displacement from the state of dreams into the realm of the visible: images that, though not eminently inviting, lure into an ambiguous presence. The staring canvases force us into a conspiracy with this poignant fairy tale and the ephemeral pleasure of fantasy and malice. Garcia immortalizes the momentary reification of boundaries between logic and absurd with the fleeting moments when the substance of dreams, in all its impermanence, seems to last forever.
Sophie Varin's intricate small canvases contain oniric suspicions, in all their strangeness and vague understanding. Solitude, intrigue, loss, and enchantment are some of the transient thoughts one rapidly holds when trying to decipher Varin’s miniature pictures. With a mixture of fiction, suspense, and clues Varin forces us to negotiate between what we desire to see and what we wish to ignore. The observer’s curiosities, fantasies, and desires manifest unconsciously in what one inevitably sees. In an almost conspicuous invitation to come closer and really look, our perception inevitably switches, and a different method of interpretation must be assumed confronted by the immensity of what can be contained in a 3 x 7 cm.
Sultana
Artists liaison
Texts
For Paris plus by Art Basel 2023 Galerie Sultana brings together 4 artists: Jean Claracq, Nanténé Traoré, Celia Hempton, Paul Maheke, and Sophie Varin, with intrusive regards, desires, and complex intentions that offer different vantage points from where to stare back when confronted with the limits of intrusion and consent.
Jean Claracq brings the past forward via savvy remarks on the culture industry of the 21st century. Claracq’s paintings exploit, in the most delicate and refined form, the language of advertisement and art history to construct desire, fascination, and lust. With eclectic references that range from medieval paintings to elements of contemporary pop culture, a dystopian view of the joie de vivre unveils a new alternative to the divine perception of the world. In the ensemble of paintings presented, Claracq encapsulates the generational angst provoked by postmodernity and social media, as heightened connectivity paradoxically amplifies a profound sense of isolation - the occasion for yet another of his play on depth and mise en abyme.
Through his camara lens Nanténé explores the tender, intimate world of queer individuals. His photography captures everyday moments that reveal the secure spaces within queer intimacy conveying a simple, heartfelt narrative at their core. In a manner reminiscent of a storyteller, he weaves tales through images with a relentless pursuit to draw nearer to that pivotal juncture in personal narratives where the stories of others transform into the universal narrative. His work serves as a living documentation of the present, crafting a new iconography of intimacy and authentic representations of transgender people.
Years of observation and visual deconstruction of the online world materialize in Celia Hempton's series of paintings Chat Random. The artworks are the remnants of her encounters on the website chatrandom.com where she meets strangers and documents her (not so) anonymous meetings in further exploration of the performative act of painting. Chat Random offers Hempton a gesture of exchange out of regular confinements where she confronts the complexities and imbalances of encounters probing into faint lines of discomfort and compliance Through these paintings, what was supposed to be a fleeting moment, multiplies and expands towards various regards of a given intimacy through an emotional response made so evident by the exquisite treatment of color mastered by the artist.
Jean Claracq brings the past forward via savvy remarks on the culture industry of the 21st century. Claracq’s paintings exploit, in the most delicate and refined form, the language of advertisement and art history to construct desire, fascination, and lust. With eclectic references that range from medieval paintings to elements of contemporary pop culture, a dystopian view of the joie de vivre unveils a new alternative to the divine perception of the world. In the ensemble of paintings presented, Claracq encapsulates the generational angst provoked by postmodernity and social media, as heightened connectivity paradoxically amplifies a profound sense of isolation - the occasion for yet another of his play on depth and mise en abyme.
Through his camara lens Nanténé explores the tender, intimate world of queer individuals. His photography captures everyday moments that reveal the secure spaces within queer intimacy conveying a simple, heartfelt narrative at their core. In a manner reminiscent of a storyteller, he weaves tales through images with a relentless pursuit to draw nearer to that pivotal juncture in personal narratives where the stories of others transform into the universal narrative. His work serves as a living documentation of the present, crafting a new iconography of intimacy and authentic representations of transgender people.
Years of observation and visual deconstruction of the online world materialize in Celia Hempton's series of paintings Chat Random. The artworks are the remnants of her encounters on the website chatrandom.com where she meets strangers and documents her (not so) anonymous meetings in further exploration of the performative act of painting. Chat Random offers Hempton a gesture of exchange out of regular confinements where she confronts the complexities and imbalances of encounters probing into faint lines of discomfort and compliance Through these paintings, what was supposed to be a fleeting moment, multiplies and expands towards various regards of a given intimacy through an emotional response made so evident by the exquisite treatment of color mastered by the artist.
Conversely, time slows down in the surveillance paintings. The mystery of a single circumscribed view, spaces that are owned and guarded yet actively trespassed upon, one-way portals into the unfamiliar: sunlight passing across a chair in a small room on the Isle of Man, a Tokyo cash point at night, a swimming pool at dawn seen through a misted lens in Arizona, or the familiar non-places - motorways or institutional corridors where banality and the uncanny coexist.
Sophie Varin’s small paintings are oneiric accumulations of fantasies fed by the urge to see and intrude: miniatures that meditate on the quasi-incontrollable desire to stare. In a mixture of fiction and suspense, they compel the observer to negotiate between what he chooses to see and what he wishes to ignore. In Varin's work gaze and desire become entangled to emerge as forbidden images of that which is not easily apprehended; of that which is elusive, for once we desire something, we can never possess it. These images create a complicit relationship between the viewer and the subject of the painting: one of contemplation and trespassing, of seeing or being seen.
The lyrical work of Paul Maheke reveals through his practice what is often left obscured and invisible. His visual work widely embedded performative actions inspired by esoteric and ancestral practices grounded on his queer experience. In Mauve, Jim, and John, hauntology, folklore, and the body of myths and legends of the site are few of the starting points of the film. The site-specific choreography was inspired by the story of UFO sightings creating a visual dialogue between observation, intrusion, and history. Maheke confronts our senses by using the traces of an observed path where bodies pull and push to intertwine and create the backdrop to the film's queer romance.
Sophie Varin’s small paintings are oneiric accumulations of fantasies fed by the urge to see and intrude: miniatures that meditate on the quasi-incontrollable desire to stare. In a mixture of fiction and suspense, they compel the observer to negotiate between what he chooses to see and what he wishes to ignore. In Varin's work gaze and desire become entangled to emerge as forbidden images of that which is not easily apprehended; of that which is elusive, for once we desire something, we can never possess it. These images create a complicit relationship between the viewer and the subject of the painting: one of contemplation and trespassing, of seeing or being seen.
The lyrical work of Paul Maheke reveals through his practice what is often left obscured and invisible. His visual work widely embedded performative actions inspired by esoteric and ancestral practices grounded on his queer experience. In Mauve, Jim, and John, hauntology, folklore, and the body of myths and legends of the site are few of the starting points of the film. The site-specific choreography was inspired by the story of UFO sightings creating a visual dialogue between observation, intrusion, and history. Maheke confronts our senses by using the traces of an observed path where bodies pull and push to intertwine and create the backdrop to the film's queer romance.
Galerie Sultana is pleased to present the work of four artists proffering different interpretations of identity and the human body in a space of in-betweenness. The works of Pia Camil, Jesse Darling, Paul Maheke, and P. Staff come together to explore how further away from the axes of privilege must one stand to secure the survival of the body and preservation of the heart.
With poetic yet political forms that foreground the vulnerable and the invisible towards subtle acts of survival, Galerie Sultana opens a conversation not only about gender and identity, but also about politics, economy, history, and human relationships.
In Todes (2022), Pia Camil reveals the pleasure of strangeness with the promise of form and the impossibility of total destruction. This biomorphic denim sculpture is the product of recreations and revisions interweaving ideas of power, consumerism, and collectiveness as an ode to the entanglement of bodies. Legs of jeans, seem to rest, or on the contrary accumulate in suspense, like abstract clumps of bodies. The tension between the concrete and the abstruse emphasizes the questioning of mass production, exploitation, and waste, related to our bodies. In this network of relation, the piece is in continuous metamorphosis compiling every interaction and attempt of interpretation.
Jesse Darling's Enclosures (2022) reflects on mortality as impermanence ironically becomes an essential condition of being human. After a fellowship exploring the histories of extractions and exhumations, and clay as a material formed from the architectural, ancestral, cultural, and corporeal bodies of our material world, the artist has translated their experience into an artwork that offers a radical rethinking of binaries and methodologies of living. These conceptual and material complexities propose a profound reflection to reimagine the human condition. The intrinsic vulnerability of the body is extended in Darling’s work as a form of precarious optimism against a greater understanding that nothing and no one is too great to fail. Their work considers our failures and decay questioning what persists, what perishes, and what outlives us.
With poetic yet political forms that foreground the vulnerable and the invisible towards subtle acts of survival, Galerie Sultana opens a conversation not only about gender and identity, but also about politics, economy, history, and human relationships.
In Todes (2022), Pia Camil reveals the pleasure of strangeness with the promise of form and the impossibility of total destruction. This biomorphic denim sculpture is the product of recreations and revisions interweaving ideas of power, consumerism, and collectiveness as an ode to the entanglement of bodies. Legs of jeans, seem to rest, or on the contrary accumulate in suspense, like abstract clumps of bodies. The tension between the concrete and the abstruse emphasizes the questioning of mass production, exploitation, and waste, related to our bodies. In this network of relation, the piece is in continuous metamorphosis compiling every interaction and attempt of interpretation.
Jesse Darling's Enclosures (2022) reflects on mortality as impermanence ironically becomes an essential condition of being human. After a fellowship exploring the histories of extractions and exhumations, and clay as a material formed from the architectural, ancestral, cultural, and corporeal bodies of our material world, the artist has translated their experience into an artwork that offers a radical rethinking of binaries and methodologies of living. These conceptual and material complexities propose a profound reflection to reimagine the human condition. The intrinsic vulnerability of the body is extended in Darling’s work as a form of precarious optimism against a greater understanding that nothing and no one is too great to fail. Their work considers our failures and decay questioning what persists, what perishes, and what outlives us.
Staff’s work is an exchange between bodies and institutions that affect human consciousness and behaviors, especially of those who stand outside binary normativity. The artist continuously conjures proximity to death in parallelism with revival grounded on his own experience as a queer person in a heteronormative world. Staff’s work puts forward a conversation on gender, intergenerational relations, and care prying on notions of discipline, dissent, and the queer body. They intend to create a historical narrative of counter-culture, radicality, and alternative forms of community.
Paul Maheke presents personal journal entries sublimed as intimate works of art both lyrical and political in nature with Feeling the Tides Within the Fluids of My Body (2019). The explicit, but penetrating artworks, paradoxically displayed in curtains and walls, offer the artist’s own voice as an additional medium to convey what is often invisible. The poetical and visual work of Maheke imparts a narrative around violence and oppression over the body bringing together subtle forces comprised in everything from politics, history, mysticism, and spiritual understandings. Maheke’s reconfiguration of the sensible intends to shift dominant systems of control and understanding through his own experience to reorient the audience into reframing their ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding.
These works have the potential to reconcile the exercise of life and freedom in the hopes for a new history of our contemporary world to form. By dismantling oppressive power structures and forms of domination, overlooked narratives will emerge rebuilding new practices of integration and togetherness.
Paul Maheke presents personal journal entries sublimed as intimate works of art both lyrical and political in nature with Feeling the Tides Within the Fluids of My Body (2019). The explicit, but penetrating artworks, paradoxically displayed in curtains and walls, offer the artist’s own voice as an additional medium to convey what is often invisible. The poetical and visual work of Maheke imparts a narrative around violence and oppression over the body bringing together subtle forces comprised in everything from politics, history, mysticism, and spiritual understandings. Maheke’s reconfiguration of the sensible intends to shift dominant systems of control and understanding through his own experience to reorient the audience into reframing their ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding.
These works have the potential to reconcile the exercise of life and freedom in the hopes for a new history of our contemporary world to form. By dismantling oppressive power structures and forms of domination, overlooked narratives will emerge rebuilding new practices of integration and togetherness.
How to fit infinity in a square
For the 2023 edition of Felix Art Fair, Galerie Sultana presents three artists: Jean Claracq, Matthias Garcia, and Sophie Varin. They each present a striking interpretation of the world against a desire of being elsewhere, without complete rejection of reality. The gallery invites a return to an essential understanding of art in encouragement to read, interpret, and fit into these paintings our complete existence: To relish solitude without loneliness in complicity with contemplation and time extended into the realm of dreams.
With portraits of detachment and yet great intimacy, Jean Claracq’s mastery of the image assembles dreams of greatness with the illusion of isolation. Claracq’s paintings are embedded with art history without the intoxicating nostalgia of the past in which the question of history is relevant only as a continuance of visual interpretations of the real; of our present, of the way artists have inevitably registered through time how existence pervades us. Behind his ostensible modesty, hides not only a highly adept artist but also a storyteller; Claracq’s canvases enforce a complex narrative into a confined space of vigil, in a direct relationship with photography, the renaissance, modernity, and social media. Grounded on the experience of his generation, contemporary culture is omnipresent in his work, opening up a space for the viewer into surreal landscapes of the prosaic.
For the 2023 edition of Felix Art Fair, Galerie Sultana presents three artists: Jean Claracq, Matthias Garcia, and Sophie Varin. They each present a striking interpretation of the world against a desire of being elsewhere, without complete rejection of reality. The gallery invites a return to an essential understanding of art in encouragement to read, interpret, and fit into these paintings our complete existence: To relish solitude without loneliness in complicity with contemplation and time extended into the realm of dreams.
With portraits of detachment and yet great intimacy, Jean Claracq’s mastery of the image assembles dreams of greatness with the illusion of isolation. Claracq’s paintings are embedded with art history without the intoxicating nostalgia of the past in which the question of history is relevant only as a continuance of visual interpretations of the real; of our present, of the way artists have inevitably registered through time how existence pervades us. Behind his ostensible modesty, hides not only a highly adept artist but also a storyteller; Claracq’s canvases enforce a complex narrative into a confined space of vigil, in a direct relationship with photography, the renaissance, modernity, and social media. Grounded on the experience of his generation, contemporary culture is omnipresent in his work, opening up a space for the viewer into surreal landscapes of the prosaic.
Contrasting Claracq’s solemnity, Matthias Garcia’s artificial paradises of flowers, carnations, and sirens unfold in a gentle but intrusive rejection of the absolute. It manifests a world that does not yet exist but patiently figurates in nuanced colors of nebulous fabrications. His aesthetic invokes a world of possibilities, in a displacement from the state of dreams into the realm of the visible: images that, though not eminently inviting, lure into an ambiguous presence. The staring canvases force us into a conspiracy with this poignant fairy tale and the ephemeral pleasure of fantasy and malice. Garcia immortalizes the momentary reification of boundaries between logic and absurd with the fleeting moments when the substance of dreams, in all its impermanence, seems to last forever.
Sophie Varin's intricate small canvases contain oniric suspicions, in all their strangeness and vague understanding. Solitude, intrigue, loss, and enchantment are some of the transient thoughts one rapidly holds when trying to decipher Varin’s miniature pictures. With a mixture of fiction, suspense, and clues Varin forces us to negotiate between what we desire to see and what we wish to ignore. The observer’s curiosities, fantasies, and desires manifest unconsciously in what one inevitably sees. In an almost conspicuous invitation to come closer and really look, our perception inevitably switches, and a different method of interpretation must be assumed confronted by the immensity of what can be contained in a 3 x 7 cm.
Liste 2023
When no words suffice, and poetry takes form out of abstraction, the evidence of time passing is made permanent.
For Liste 2023, Galerie Sultana presents Justin Fitzpatrick, Gal Schindler, P. Staff, and Paul Maheke: four artists with stylistic, generational, and conceptual differences that redefine the edges of the art of portraiture beyond figurative representations.
The work of these artists is a testament to changing times and how the difference between significance and interpretations is a question of historical development. Today, objects we hold dear and precious become extensions of one's personality, desires, and foes. The duality of oneself, impossible to figurate, awaits its creation in colorful abstractions of ghastly images. Our obsessions and infatuations with the world and its history become a reflection of identity, even sometimes hinged with the ghosts that hunt us.
The portraits presented innately question the codes that have signaled our existence and what lives on to tell the story of who we are and how we want to be remembered.
For Liste 2023, Galerie Sultana presents Justin Fitzpatrick, Gal Schindler, P. Staff, and Paul Maheke: four artists with stylistic, generational, and conceptual differences that redefine the edges of the art of portraiture beyond figurative representations.
The work of these artists is a testament to changing times and how the difference between significance and interpretations is a question of historical development. Today, objects we hold dear and precious become extensions of one's personality, desires, and foes. The duality of oneself, impossible to figurate, awaits its creation in colorful abstractions of ghastly images. Our obsessions and infatuations with the world and its history become a reflection of identity, even sometimes hinged with the ghosts that hunt us.
The portraits presented innately question the codes that have signaled our existence and what lives on to tell the story of who we are and how we want to be remembered.