Y SI MADRID FUERA MI CASA
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
FEBRUARY 17TH – APRIL 20TH. 2024

Curator : Joël Andrianomearisoa

Narrating geographies
Those of other geographies but especially those of the intimate.
This is beginning of the proposition Y SI MADRID FUERA MI CASA.

A process that Joël Andrianomearisoa has been implementing for some time around the globe, in the cities close to his heart.
After Paris… Antananarivo… and Chicago,
Now Madrid.

A formula in which he is more than an artist.
He becomes above all the host of a house!
An he invites his friends, his companions and his accomplices to his home,
to invade space,
to build the house of dreams and desires,
to discuss around the world and time.

In Madrid, in a spanish breath, la Maison becomes la Casa,
sensual, spiritual, conflictual, timeless and eternal.
A house of time is installed in Madrid.
Within time, the time of time.

LE CRÉPUSCULE DES PROMESSES ÉTERNELLES
FLOW GALLERY . ANTANANARIVO . MADAGASCAR
2023

This exhibition is the first chapter in a cycle that Joël Andrianomearisoa is unfolding across time and geography. This cycle begins here in Antananarivo, his hometown, where his last exhibition was held several years ago. In this exhibition, he brings together the hallmarks of his visual and artistic identity, drawing the strength of his aesthetic not only from the poetry and musicality of words, but also from materials such as textiles, paper and metal.

© Kevin Ramarohetra

LITANIE DES HORIZONS OBSCURS
ALMINE RECH GALLERY . FRONT SPACE . PARIS . FRANCE
2023

In line with Joël Andrianomearisoa’s work and his recent artistic interventions based on evolution and constant change, such as the recent exhibition “Decay: An Ode to the Impermanent” at the Buro Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Malagasy-French artist takes us on a journey through the history of his “Litanies des horizons obscurs” through 3 chapters during his presentation with Almine Rech.

First: the word. An emblematic figure in the artist’s work, the word is presented with the launch of a collection of poems, “Sentimental whispers”, in collaboration with Almine Rech Editions. This first chapter is complemented by the exhibition of three works featuring the artist’s verses.

© Nicolas Brasseur

The second chapter consists of three historic textile works. One set of 24 pieces ‘Labyrinth of Passions’ 2018, and a large piece ‘La Dérive des Sentiments II’ 2016. Joël Andrianomerisoa was awarded the 4th Audemars Piguet Prize for his work, ‘The Labyrinth of Passions’, exhibited at VIP ARCO-Madrid 2016, becoming the first non-Spanish artist to receive this award.

The third chapter is devoted to drawing. A medium that allows Joël to let himself be completely carried away by his intuition. These works, a selection of which was presented by the gallery at Art Brussels 2023, reflect the authenticity of the artist’s practice as well as his formal restlessness.

“Les Litanies des horizons obscurs” will round off this experience, during which visitors will live different stories through this evolving display. These textile pieces, presented at MACAAL in Marrakech, reflect Joël’s desire to return to the sources, as well as his interest in craftsmanship, by rediscovering ancestral techniques and bringing them to the forefront of contemporary art.

MY HEART BELONGS TO THE OTHER
CHURCH PROJECTS . CAPE TOWN . SOUTH AFRICA
2023

The other is a conversation  with the land on the other side.
Land Madagascar.
Land not only perceived as a territory but also as an intrigue.
Rather a scenario named the other.
A display around the desire towards the other, the vital dependance towards the other.

© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa

The other is a mystery yet the other attracts us
The other is intriguing yet the other inspires us
The other is a stranger yet the other calls out to us
The other is a geography and this land is calling us
The project itself is a metaphor
without giving the land its name
Thus the presence of the other, of others
The other of names full of symbols
To read, to quote, to dress and undress
The other is a blind map drown in the darkness of our desires.

ON A NEVER ENDING HORIZON A FUTURE NOSTALGIA TO KEEP THE PRESENT ALIVE
NOOR FESTIVAL . RIYADH . SAUDI ARABIA
2022

Curator : Hervé Mikaeloff

From Antananarivo to Paris, from mixed-media installation to Dior collaboration, Andrianomearisoa’s work is simply magnetizing. Inspired by the cadence of the city, his textural work triggers an emotional response in audiences of all ages. Unsurprisingly, he has been invited to collaborate with some of the world’s greatest names over the years.

ON A NEVER ENDING HORIZON A FUTURE NOSTALGIA TO KEEP THE PRESENT ALIVE

Using neon lights and metal, On a never ending horizon a future nostalgia to keep the present alive was commissioned for Noor Riyadh and speaks of love, hope and dreams. Or to use the artist’s words: “a sign, a light, a poem… The horizon is the playground for our eyes, but most of all, our dreams. Here lies the theatre of our affections, but most of all, our hopes. On the horizon is where we call for a new future whilst we dance on the wave of the present time, following the moment’s steps. Light is the essential ingredient that allows us to dream of other worlds, other times.”
With this installation, Andrianomearisoa invites you to question time, your horizons and, as always, your emotions and desires.

Hervé Mikaeloff

© Ammar Abd Rabbo

THE FIVE CONTINENTS OF ALL OUR DESIRES
ZEITZ MOCAA . CAPE TOWN . SOUTH AFRICA
2022

Curator : Storm Janse Van Rensburg

The atrium of Zeitz MOCAA welcomes a new, site-specific commission of monumental scale by Joël Andrianomearisoa. The Five Continents of All Our Desires celebrates relations and connections. Constructed from Andrianomearisoa’s signature material, black silk paper, six large-scale sculptures form a suspended archipelago in a poetic reference to land masses and geographies of the imagination. For Andrianomearisoa, the work speaks to both migration and language — and the ongoing search for zones of engagement and desire. He constructs a view of the world that is fragile, ambiguous, open-ended and about new possibilities for human contact.

© Dillon Marsh

The work is conceived in dialogue with the concrete interior of the museum, and what remains of the original silos of the building; it is both in play and in visual tension with its surroundings. Whilst appearing as large black masses, the thin and soft materiality of the work allows for subtle atmospheric responses to become visible — such as paper rustling due to airflows caused by human movement.

The Five Continents of All Our Desires is accompanied by a sound installation, and a display of 40 drawings—a first, significant showing of the artist’s graphic works. Andrianomearisoa has further collaborated with the Zeitz MOCAA curatorial team and retail partners of the museum to develop an exclusive range of objects that will be on sale. All proceeds from the sale of these items will go towards supporting the work of the museum.

This commission was made possible through a grant from Fonds Yavarhoussen, Madagascar.

 

Storm Janse Van Rensburg

OUR LAND JUST LIKE A DREAM
MACAAL . MARRAKECH . MOROCCO
2022

Curator : Meriem Berrada

Our Land Just Like A Dream is an invitation to experience relationships between materials, forms, and territories in a different way, challenging the commonly accepted boundary between artistic and artisanal creations. For its very first monographic exhibition dedicated to a contemporary artist, MACAAL has invited Joël Andrianomearisoa to occupy all of the museum’s spaces in an exploration of Moroccan traditional knowledge. The artist engages dialogue with diverse artistic perspectives in an immersive scenography, punctuated by a selection of works from the Fondation Alliances collections. The exhibition’s title is a verse, a chanted poem or mantra that speaks of origin and earth, evoking the infinite possibilities held within the material—raw material—that Joël Andrianomearisoa appropriates, reshapes, or reinvents. The artist is fascinated by ancestral textile arts, and has collaborated with master artisans for more than two decades. From his native city of Antananarivo (Madagascar) to Aubusson (France) by way of Udaipur (India), he takes pleasure in the juxtaposition of his own artistic approach with the excellence and poetics of the gesture crafts.

© Ayoub El Bardii

The works produced for Our Land Just Like A Dream were created exclusively in situ, making use of a diversity of traditional skills in an ongoing conversation with the people who practice them. The resulting works are his personal interpretations of Morocco’s artistic heritage as well as his tribute to hand craft, a vector of secular transmission. Sensitive to the materials that he encounters, the artist spans various mediums with commitment and with elegance. Wickerwork, metalwork, ceramics and embroidery are all in service to his poetic vision, through textile installations, metallic sculptures, or drawings on organic paper; all possibilities offered by the artist’s new host territory. This same quest for resonance led Andrianomearisoa to invite six artists to engage in unexpected visual conversations. Each of his accomplices—visual artist, actress, or musician—explores goldsmithing, textile, installation or engraving in response to Joël Andrianomearisoa’s lyrical odyssey. Our Land Just Like A Dream brings together material, vocal, and spoken word crafts to create a geography with multiple points of entry.

RANDOM DESIRES FOR A CERTAIN KIND OF ARCHITECTURE
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2022

Random desires for a certain kind of architecture was conceived during a studio master class that Andrianomearisoa gave to architecture students at Confluence Institute in Paris, in which the final exercise was to propose a project from a different approach to architecture, through alternative inspirations: a fragrance, a gaze, a taste, a piece of fashion design, … The artist decided to carry out the same exercise for this individual exhibition.

In Random desires for a certain kind of architecture Andrianomearisoa approaches architecture departing from emotions, words and moods, through pastel drawings, paintings, textile works and sculptures. The result is a surprising display of emotional rationalization, an exercise in balancing dualities, divided into three different acts: gesture, projection and volume.

© Sabrina Amrani gallery

The first part of the exhibition opens with pastel drawings, as a preliminary step to the materialization of an architecture, working first on flat surfaces and then elevating those concepts to three-dimensional structures. The drawings give way to vigorous paintings on canvas, where Andrianomearisoa introduces color in a furious abstract explosion of architectural projection, sentimental and nostalgic.

The exhibition continues with the new body of textile works Random Desires, which are executed by the artist as if architectural constructions, and somehow resemble building facades, with overlapping bricks and even windows. Using discarded and found fabrics, Andrianomearisoa knits architecture, weaves construction, and sews structures.

Finally, the volume is confirmed as one of the artist’s current interests in the form of seventeen sculptures of different sizes supported by a massive pedestal that dominates and occupies the space of the gallery, in a reaction of the artist to the very idea of ​​the gallery and its function. The sculptures convey texts in the three languages ​​that are part of the artist’s life: Malagasy, French and English, with the subtle and poetic lyrics signature of Andrianomearisoa.

Random desires for a certain kind of architecture answers the question of whether it is possible to make architecture from unconventional perspectives, randomly through time and through our desires, the desires of the world, an architecture for all.

Jal Hamad

LES PRÉMICES D’UNE MÉLANCOLIE INFINIE
STANDING PINE . NAGOYA . JAPAN
2022

To speak of melancholy is to speak of duality.

The duality of time.
The duality of emotions.
The duality of desires.
The duality of bodies.
The duality of our lives.

One day alive, one day dead.
One day smile, one day sadness.
One day here, one day in Antananarivo.
One day in, one day out.
A black day, a white day.

© Standing Pine

It is in the interstice of these dualities that Andrianomearisoa draws the meaning and the ardor of his work. Between the shadow of a black line and the light of white cotton, the work reveals itself. Here for his solo exhibition for the first time in two years in Nagoya, through textiles, he combines black and white but also draws an imprint in oil pastel on paper.

Vertical lines like the double beat rhythms of our heartbeats. Lines drawn sometimes straight sometimes interrupted like tears that flow without ever taking a single trajectory. Tears of joy or sorrow.

In this new proposal Andrianomearisoa transports us to his universe always filled with emotion. This emotion that he does not want abstract but always material like an infinite exercise. The materiality of emotions to be read without particular languages and above all without geography.

Joël Andrianomearisoa

JOSEP LE MONDE ET MOI
JOSEP THE WORLD AND I
JOSEP EL MÓN I JO
JOSEP EL MUNDO Y YO
CENTRE GRAU-GARRIGA D’ART TEXTÌL CONTEMPORANI . SANT-CUGAT DEL VALLÈS . SPAIN
2022

Curator : Esther Grau-Garriga I Quintana

An image, which links the work Les Nouvelles cartographies du désir by Joël Andrianomearisoa, in the exhibition Brise du Rouge Soleil (Aigues-Mortes, France, 2021), with the work monument A l’Anarquia (1976) by Josep Grau-Garriga, is the germ of the exhibition Josep le monde et moi. Bringing these two works together was intuitively revealing, and was the starting point for inviting Joël Andrianomearisoa to exhibit at the Centre Grau-Garriga d’Art Tèxtil Contemporani and at the monastery of Sant Cugat.

© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa .

The exhibition brings together two artists from different generations who have never met, with experiences and imaginaries belonging to distant places and times, but who are nevertheless able to dialogue on the basis of their common creative attitude.With very particular artistic expressions, and with a body of work that apparently have little to do with each other – beyond the use of textile – Andrianomearisoa and Grau-Garriga share a fascinating combination of passion and intimacy. their work, with their own languages and codes, converge in nuclear and transversal aspects, where roots, affections, links and a deep respect for the details of the lived experience, coexist with porosity, with the desire to be penetrated by new and diverse horizons. Monumental and intimate, expansive and symbolic, Joël and Josep share the same way of living through creation, while they create what they live they experiment, construct, elaborate and transform with different materials, avoiding frontiers… on the loom, on the sheet of paper, on canvas or in the space.

Josep le monde et moi undertakes symbolic worlds in white, black and red, colours that dress these rooms with traces of the physical worlds and the emotional universes of two artists who weave their world by letting the world weave them.

This journey is a small world of their worlds, which begins with the silent white of intimacy, the delicacy of memories, and the revival of affections. It continues with the dense black night of stillness, solitude, sensuality and infinity. and it ends with the illuminating red, the red of passion for the discovery of other worlds.

Finally, the world of the angels in the chapterhouse of the cloister of the Sant-Cugat monastery; dancing with the angels, by Andrianomearisoa, and Mort I resurrecció, by Grau-Garriga, two large installations that dialogue, from the mystery, on what is no longer earthly.

Esther Grau-Garriga I Quintana

LES HERBES FOLLES DU VIEUX LOGIS
PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY . MILAN . ITALY
2022

Les herbes folles du vieux logis is the title chosen by Joël Andrianomearisoa for his latest series of works. A title borrowed from the Malagasy poet Maurice Ramarozaka and from his collection, the one who considered poetry as a way of being and living across multiple geographies.

This new series in three steps – pastel drawings, textile paintings, squares of golden silk threads on cotton fabric – is an opportunity to once again evoke one of the constants of the artist’s work: the alliance and the dialogue with this original material that are fabrics, linked to his homeland, of which he makes himself the heir.

Click here to access to the full version of Françoise Docquiert’s text Les Herbes Folles Du Vieux Logis

© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa © Greta Belintende

AU RYTHME DE NOS DÉSIRS DANSONS SUR LA VAGUE DU TEMPS
CHÂTEAU DE VILLERS-COTTERÊTS . FRANCE
2022

Curator : Bernard Blistène

Joël Andrianomearisoa, a pioneer of Malagasy contemporary art and a well-known figure on the international art scene. He studied architecture at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris and immediately began to experiment with a wide variety of techniques and materials, which he uses in all possible forms.
A visual artist, with an appreciation of the written word as well as the many forms of poetry, Andrianomearisoa here creates a monumental work from a short text inviting the viewer “to enter into a dialogue with the world “. Taking words as a material to be sculpted, which he carves out in metal, he builds an architectural structure shaped like a sign on which he hangs the sentence, in order to encourage the visitor to echo his invitation.

Conceived between 2021 and 2022 and presented for the first time in the grounds of the Château de Villers-Cotterêts – the future Cité internationale de la langue française – the work is an invitation both to fully appreciate the power of words and to dream of a re-enchanted future.

Bernard Blistène

© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa

HISTOIRE D’UN DÉPART
TOULOUSE BLAGNAC AIRPORT . TOULOUSE . FRANCE
2021 – 2023

Toulouse Blagnac Airport and Les Abattoirs, Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of the City of Toulouse and Regional Fund of Contemporary Art for the region) have been working together since 2012 to present a series of exhibitions within the Airport in order to offer its passengers and visitors suspended moments, a breath of fresh air, and to create a real experience.

© Théo Verdier

ZARIDAINA . GEOGRAPHY OF DESIRE
LE SILO U1 . CHÂTEAU THIERRY . FRANCE
2021

Through the installations he proposes in this exhibition at Silo U1, we can guess the artist’s path that combines a skill learned in fashion design and costume making with a training in plastic arts and architecture. The meters of fabric that he collects become for example sculptures under his fingers, both monumental and fragile. The crumpled, compressed and cut materials take place in space in geometric forms that unfold a sensitive landscape.

© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa

BRISE DU ROUGE SOLEIL
TOWERS AND RAMPARTS OF AIGUES-MORTES . FRANCE
2021

Curator : N’Goné Fall

Brise du rouge soleil (Breeze of the red sun), carte blanche for the artist Joël Andrianomearisoa.
Around the towers and walls of Aigues-Mortes in France’s Camargue district, Joël Andrianomearisoa presents a sensitive, poetic itinerary of 18 installations. Reflecting his imagination and echoing the history of the monument and its territory, the prodigious layout created by the artist gradually appears, inducing a series of emotions and surprises. The visitor winds out a thread that interlinks different narratives – some told by the artist; others based on the monument’s past and our personal ventures.

Inspired by the memory of the ancient citadel-port on the Mediterranean coast, the Malagasy poet Maurice Ramarozaka (1931-2010), the lagoon and salt marshes, and materials from Camargue and other places, the artist guides us on an endless journey from tower to tower and along the walls of Aigues-Mortes in a tour resembling a long poem, like a roll of papyrus that reveals mysterious clues.

© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa

LES HERBES FOLLES DU VIEUX LOGIS
DOMAINE DE CHAUMONT-SUR-LOIRE . FRANCE
2021

Curator : Chantal Colleu-Dumond

The 2021 Art Season is once again on the theme of nature, and the work of around fifteen new artists, including some original creations, as in previous years, interact with the landscape and architecture of the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire.
First and foremost, two fantastic artists, Miquel Barceló and Paul Rebeyrolle are celebrated this time. These artists both have a great energy and enjoy working with raw materials, playing with the thickness of objects and the textures of the tangible and of nature. With the power of tormented despair, they express their deepest feelings of the pain and joy of being, of living. Miquel Barceló  designs an original artwork in terracotta and ceramic for a grove in the Historic Grounds, while the Château will house around thirty beautiful landscape representations by Paul Rebeyrolle. Abdul Rahman Katanani uses his own experiences of violence and suffering to present some surprising barbed wire nests in the trees throughout the Grounds.

 

As a stark contrast, Chiharu Shiota’s delicate dark and web-like fibres will take over the Lower Le Fenil Gallery, much like vibrant nerve cells, while the Donkey Stables house Carole Solvay’s subtle creations using wire and feathers. The colourful delicacy of Sheila Hicks’ work is displayed in the Château’s Grand spiral staircase, while Safia Hijos’ poetic creepers made from ceramic climbs the walls of the Stables.
For the very first time, drawings are exhibited at Chaumont-sur-Loire, in the Agnès Varda Courtyard Galleries, featuring the dreamlike and philosophical works of Fabien Mérelle, and the poetic worlds of François Réau and Min Jung-Yeon. A collection of prints by Jean Dubuffet takes pride of place in the Château’s Porcupine Gallery, with the extraordinary series entitled Les Phénomènes.
The adventure continues with Pascal Convert, who adds to his glass library and roots, unveiled in 2020, with an incredible crystallised child’s bedroom, while Chris Drury, who has already created a very beautiful Carbon pool for the Domain, brings a brand-new original piece to the Bee Barn. Last but not least, a never-before-seen outdoor creation from Joël Andrianomearisoa  interacts with the plant world of Agnès Varda Courtyard.
These new creations, when combined with the artworks already on display, provide visitors to the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire with a wonderfully poetic and revitalising experience.

 

Chantal Colleu-Dumond

 

POUR NE JAMAIS RENCONTRER LA DERNIÈRE HEURE
MAISON MARIA CASARÈS . ALLOUE . FRANCE
2021

Curator : Marie-Cécile Zinsou

With the help of a guide and in groups, visitors discover the history of the Logis de la Vergne (listed in the supplementary inventory of historical monuments) and particularly the life of Maria Casarès: her life as an artist, a refugee, a woman of the 20th century. Beyond the traces left by its illustrious owner, this visit is also an opportunity to discover the work of the artist, Joël Andrianomearisoa. The summer of 2021 has a special flavor. It is the last summer where visitors can discover the house as Maria Casarès left it. Necessary renovation work could not wait any longer. In order to celebrate this particular moment in the history of the Domaine, we had to ritualize this mourning in order to welcome this new stage.
We asked Joël Andrianomearisoa to come and intervene in these spaces and to propose installations in the Logis, to put into perspective with all his sensitivity and poetry this problem of the passing of time and the traces of the heritage that remain.

© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa

TRANSLATION OF ALL OUR LOST PASSIONS AND OUR FUTURE DESIRES
KUNSTHALLE PRAHA . PRAGUE . CZECH REPUBLIC
2021

Curator : Christelle Havranek

In the spirit of the Mail Art movement, Joël Andrianomearisoa strives to establish a new type of exchange between his works and the public, between his convictions and the reality of the world. To engage with the transforming spaces of the Kunsthalle Praha, the artist has conceived an epistolary project, which he calls ‘Translations of all our lost passions and our future desires’.
Joël Andrianomearisoa has decided to display this title in glowing neon letters on the building’s façade, and to write this text in his mother tongue: Malagasy. The decision not to translate a rare language, in a location where it has little chance of being understood, is deliberate. Not to translate is to avoid the ‘approximation of discourse which produces a new discourse”.

The enigmatic sentence invites us to consider otherness. Language and multilingualism have always lain at the heart of Joël Andrianomearisoa’s approach. As a multicultural artist, he manipulates words much as he does objects; assembling, combining and interpreting textures and texts from here and elsewhere, creating a protean, polyphonic work.

© Lukás Masner © Shotby.us  © Vojtěch Veškrna

DANCING WITH THE ANGELS
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2021

Joël Andrianomearisoa does not impose certainty, he offers a sensitive exploration of this border which freezes all duality. He likes to weave in this gap, from a multitude of possibilities. By composing serenely in this in-between, he comes here to challenge the definition of a desire that ends up preempting pleasure. In a fruitful exercise of desire, never associated with its culpable counterpart, Joël summons the shared rhythmic allowed by dance: a space of expression and bodily freedom created with the Other.
Through the figure of the angel, both benevolent and invisible, he invokes this Other and brings him face to face in a game of reminiscences in several forms. It invites physical memory and pays homage, to learned shivers, to plundered ecstasies, to the part of the other that one carries within oneself. He suggests that we follow the intimate path choreographed with those who continue to live in each of us.

© Sabrina Amrani gallery

At the entrance of the gallery, like a commemorative banner, The Angels chant a succession of first names whose various sounds prevent any geographic circumscription. He says nothing about the relationship he has with those who carry them, those who have permeated him and whom he ends up
inviting to settle in him. Far from the alienating meaning associated with desire, the artist cherishes and nurtures these moments, these relationships, these inspirations. He makes these “openings to the world” indelible and celebrates them with poetic and aesthetic power.

Joël creates a walk from a multitude of artificial flowers gleaned online and around the world, whether or not they are a faithful reflection of species existing in Nature. Replicas of tulips, tropical flowers or agapanthus intertwine, tame and coexist in a totemic symbiosis. Further refining the already fragile border of dualistic representations, Joël does not decide between celebration and commemoration. The installation combines them without creating an amalgam. The artist-florist gives each of them the freedom to display themselves in their diversity by inviting them to inhabit space, together.
Conceived as a series of irregular landscapes, the series of drawings lets glimpse here and there, through its repetitive linearities, presences and absences, and reminds us that both are never absolute. Combining the precision of graphite with the indelibility of pastel, the drawings reveal traces
of memory lying on the reassuring softness of the textile fiber. Through an intuitive but never improvised arrangement, Joël Andrianomearisoa takes us into a sensitive questioning about what we are, through the irrefutable affirmation of desire. Without ever freezing in a geography, he whispers an answer to us in several voices.

Meriem Berrada

WE WERE SO VERY MUCH IN LOVE
MUSÉE D’ART ROGER-QUILLIOT . CLERMONT-FERRAND . FRANCE
2020

Curators : Christine Bouilloc, Nathalie Roux and Christine Athenor

In July 2020, the artist presented his project for Clermont-Ferrand, which was as follows: WE WERE SO VERY MUCH IN LOVE 
“The phrase echoes like a nostalgic appeal alluding to a past love, a story from another time, a better time. But the idea is not love, not alone. We are not dealing with love, but rather with what revolves around that love, a love with a capital L or a love with a capital B (for break-up).
The temporality of love, its former time, the end, the separation, its present and what comes after, and how to put it right… Romance is ultimately a pretext for us to talk about our time, which is finally a time that remains unchanged, but which has certainly changed our perceptions – nostalgic ones that lead to the promise of an undoubtedly better future. That is why the proposition is divided into different stages.

© Juan Cruz Ibañez

The zero stage: a prelude that uses light to set the tone, the iconic title We were so very much in love, a word to the city, an appeal to the world. Then the fugue, as at the opera, with a curtain rising in the middle of the atrium. The drama of our affections, from transparency to opacity, will play out on that curtain.
Stage two: lacrimosa, a time for tears of comfort for the loss of a loved one; a distress that will simultaneously unfold in reflections stretching to infinity, like a mirror ball whose facets are a day of joy and a night of grief.
Stage three: black, a projection into sadness, sombreness, distress, like an impossible, dead-end inventory. One last time, the fabrics are there to remind us of the sensuality of beings and a last breath.
Stage four: remnants, the archaeology of our passions, the high points of vertigo, textiles projected among fashion dresses and, at the same time, windless Madagascan shrouds, the dead tree of my new life saying that we are not all dead.
Stage five: the promise. A long, tender piece of music marks the time of our heartbeats: boom; boom and again boom. Yes, we are alive, and even at four in the morning by the light of a smoked cigarette, desire will always be present.

Other acts will have their place in this project of timeless chapters, such as a scrap of shroud at the Musée Bargoin or textile scenes engaging the permanent collection of the MARQ in conversations. And to conclude, like a consolation, the public will be invited to acquire a few ‘sentimental products’ at the museum’s gift shop – souvenirs of that lost love or the wonderful romance to come.

To our finest emotions, long live love.”

THIS EVENING THE NIGHT DOESN’T WANT TO END
DOMAINE DE CHAUMONT-SUR-LOIRE . FRANCE
2020

Curator : Chantal Colleu-Dumond

At Chaumont-sur-Loire, Joël Andrianomearisoa employs a variety of materials from silk paper to textiles and plays on subtleties of light to tell a stunningly poetic tale.
A voyage translated from the night
materials of light and absence
the immaterial nature of the invisible world
black light to the green of life
melancholy
the first day, the last night
the infinite horizon
the geometry of the angle that brings tears
the present

© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa

Continuing the voyage begun with the piece I HAVE FORGOTTEN THE NIGHT, produced and presented at the first Madagascar Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Joël Andrianomearisoa now brings his work to the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire.

The message of the night is not limited to the piece alone, but involves a total deployment of the cycle of night until day and its eternal repetition.

Five new productions punctuate each chapter of the account. The proposition is divided into 5 stages that translate the intangibility of this invisible world. A journey through the dark night of oblivion to the full daylight of life. Melancholy sets the rhythm, paper the expression and textiles the respiration.

Chapter 1: I have forgotten the night (Galerie basse du Fenil)

Chapter 2: Twilight (Cour Agnès Varda)

Chapter 3: Waiting for the dawn that will catch us on the banks of sleep (Galleries of the Cour Agnès Varda)

Chapter 4: Full daylight (Galleries of the Cour Agnès Varda)

Chapter 5: Never-ending story (Galleries of the Cour Agnès Varda)

SERENADE IS NOT DEAD
DALLAS CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM . DALLAS . UNITED-STATES OF AMERICA
2020

Curator : Laurie Ann Farrell

 For the artist “serenade is a sentimental act, but above all, an act of humanity – a way to put feelings, emotions and desires back at the center of discussion. A way to address something we have lost in our society today.” Furthermore, Andrianomearisoa’s exhibition affirms that “seduction is not dead, emotions are not dead and we are (all) still alive!”
Serenade Is Not Dead highlights Andrianomearisoa’s architectural background through a carefully orchestrated grid presentation of his textile references to the body, serigraphic landscapes, appropriated and repackaged “sentimental products”, and sculptures offering a mini retrospective of the artist’s working methods.  Viewers will connect to the artist’s visual explorations of love and longing (or “territories of desire”) through abstraction, references to the figure, conceptual appropriation, and photography.

Serenade Is Not Dead is supported by Nathalie Aureglia, Monaco.

© Dallas Contemporary Museum

TOMORROW, TOMORROW. THOSE ARE FLOWERS. SO HOW ABOUT TOMORROW?
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2019

The impact strength of the work of Joël Andrianomearisoa, the tracing he left in space, his mark, has always had an ostentatiously present character. The energy it generates continually recalls its presence, emphasizes the lack of time, a space created from chronological laws, an incisiveness that shakes the monochrome. This aspect that constitutes the totality of the artistic production of Andrianomearisoa plays with the no-time, highlighting its repetition, marking the rhythm of a not before and not after, when using references that sink their roots in ancient rites and therefore they seem to look to the past; what they really do is bring to light, in visual and spatial terms, the visceral beginnings of humanity, the non-chronological but inextricably constitutive roots of human nature and its way of being in the world.

© Sabrina Amrani gallery

The use that Andrianomearisoa has always made of different expressive tools is presented here in all its wealth of details that highlight the procedural excellence and the basic meaning dictated by the fold, the meticulousness: aspects through which the space reveals the secrets of color, its evolutions and its density. The operation carried out by the artist for this personal exhibition may seem at first sight a contradiction with what has been said up to now, especially if the accent is placed on the expressive and almost pungent force of the presented works, whose invisible needles annoy the air, or perhaps they stimulate their retreat to make room for the advance of a trinitarian or destructive dimension of any space-time division.

In fact, the division proposed by the tour within the exhibition space is a real ironic position, subtle and profound at the same time with respect to the conception of time. The questioning in relation to the most hidden meaning of the past, the most appropriate meaning of the present and the most probable of the future is investigated even more deeply when the artist uses these chronological compartments considering them as different moments of his artistic career and, therefore, using himself as a guinea pig. 

The entrance to the gallery consists of the presence of a work entitled Dark Sky (2013), which acts as a representation of the past, but which gives the impression of being a door to the revelation of the work itself. The visitor is faced with having to deal with a game whose purpose is to find the real entrance to the exhibition space, which underscores the intrinsic difficulty of coming into explicit contact with the work and, once the correct form of entrance is found, light is revealed, the revelation is fulfilled. It seems like to be entering the creative process of the artist, that process made only of moments in which the form is revealed in its dimensionality and in which Bergsonian duration finds its vertex of expression: a temporary absence in which the creative gesture lasts in its absolute manifestation. 

The second part of the exhibition consists of an installation that refers to the present: through a set of works, suspended or not, the artist’s most recent production is presented and what is visible here is not time, the work of art as such. The composite elements of mirrors, besides constituting the whole work, act as a visual game of reflections of the past and the future or, therefore, of their conjunction in a single timeless stage that develops in several directions. 

The third and final part of the exhibition renders clear the artist’s radical questioning of the most appropriate meaning of these temporal giants by ironising about the customary conception of the future term, as well as shared expectations towards this temporal dimension. 

The future is now so visible and clear that it is clearer than the present. So clear as to be declared, to be self-declared: a true visual tautology. Finally, what in reality probably this textile wall and its repeated words “Tomorrow, tomorrow” want to represent is a space trampoline, an immediate reference to the space of the present that also includes that tomorrow or that includes it without naming it. And you, do you like flowers? 

Domenico de Chirico . 2019

BLUE TAKE ME TO THE END OF ALL LOVES
PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY . MILAN . ITALY
2019

Joël Andrianomearisoa, with his full, sinister and joyous affirmations, was never tempted by the glory of the Nothing, but avidly by the sobriety of the All. That would mean nothing unless the images and spaces, the universe of Joël Andrianomearisoa were not there to give the non-speech, this new unknown, a form.
The artist’s work develops around a non-explicit, often abstract, narration, which everyone perceives yet, cannot put a name to. His world of forms weaves his work into sequences often mired in a deep sadness caused by an absence that is impossible to fill.
And for that he uses, in no particular hierarchical order, sound in its immaterial dimension or the book in its hyper materiality, silky textile or rough plastic, black or the most shimmering colours.
For his second solo at the Gallery the entire focus is on Blue, a thousand millions shades, those ones recalling the different skies witnessed every day in Madagascar, his mother country. From this new approach Andrianomearisoa is giving material expression to the complexity of blue to infinity. More blue than the blue of your eyes, mood indigo, blues and blue emotions.

© Primo Marella Gallery
Joël Andrianomearisoa’s work has developed over time through different mediums and materials.
In recent years, his creations have often been made from textiles, paper, sometimes wood, minerals, or from unexpected objects (mirrors, perfumes, stamps … etc.) with which he reinvents magic and causes the emotion.
This “aesthetic emotion”, often sought and rarely achieved, and which is beyond comment.
BLUE
TAKE ME
TO THE END
OF ALL LOVES
PLUS BLEU QUE LE BLEU
DE TES YEUX,
JE NE VOIS RIEN DE MIEUX,
MÊME LE BLEU DES CIEUX.
FROM BEIGE – BLACK TO BLUE.
BLUE THE COLOR OF BOYS
FOUNDED MATERIAL AND TEXTILES FROM ALL AROUND THE WORLD AND MADAGASCAR
AZURE
BLUE, HUMAN EMOTION OF SADNESS
PLUS BLEU QUE LE BLEU
DE TES YEUX
MOOD INDIGO
LE CIEL BLEU D’IMERINA
BLUE, THE BLUES, MELANCHOLY

CARTOGRAPHY OF DESIRES, THE SPACE BETWEEN US
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . ENCOUNTERS SECTOR ART BASEL IN HONG KONG
2019

Curator : Alexie Glass-Kantor

The Encounters section at Art Basel Hong Kong, where large-scale sculptures and installations are shown, will reflect “the accelerated sense of absurdity at a time where persistent political revolutions and social uprisings are part of our new normal”, according to Alexie Glass-Kantor, the section’s curator for the fifth year running. “The theme, ‘Still We Rise’, explores thresholds between life and death, between collapse and resurrection.”
 Over half the participants are from the region, she says. “Most of these artists are also not household names.” This year’s presentation includes eight site-specific projects and four existing installations (all the works are for sale).
The work consists of four lines of wood beams at different heights, from where 21 linen sheets with silk paper elements hang. One of the beams holds seven fluorescent lamps, which mark the acts into which the work is divided.
It is neither a painting, a sculpture nor an architectural assemblage, although it has something of each. The work is an installation that has different elements that refer to architecture, painting and sculpture, but also to love, desire, loss, despair and hope.

Gareth Harris . 2019

NO HABÍAMOS TERMINADO DE HABLAR SOBRE EL AMOR
CENTRO DE ARTE ALCOBENDAS . MADRID . SPAIN
2018

In Joël Andrianomearisoa’s work melancholy, memories and personal narrative are intertwined in the physical and emotional memory of the materials that the artist uses to build his pieces. The individual exhibition No habíamos terminado de hablar sobre el Amor invites the visitor to go through a story in six acts where structures, silk paper and textiles invoke memories and feelings.
The show extends beyond the exhibition areas of the center, invading the media library and other areas of the museum, in which the artist intervenes with textual works on vinyl. The work of Joël Andrianomearisoa is a research on light: as if he was a painter Andrianomearisoa works with volume, matter and light using, instead of pigments and oil, textiles and the color black as a point of departure.

© Sabrina Amrani Gallery

SUR UN HORIZON INFINI SE JOUE LE THÉÂTRE DE NOS AFFECTIONS
FONDATION ZINSOU & MUSÉE OUIDAH . COTONOU . BÉNIN
2018

Curator : Marie-Cécile Zinsou

The Fondation Zinsou hands over all its areas at the headquarters of the foundation in the Ouidah museum in Cotonou to the artist Joël Andrianomearisoa for a carte blanche in 3 acts and 3 areas, entitled: Sur un horizon infini se joue le théâtre de nos affections. This is the artist’s first large personal exhibition on the continent and in Benin. He occupies the spaces with a fresh rhythm, deploying installations, words, objects, images, sounds and moods assisted by the foundation’s entire team, friends and local knowhow.
Sur un horizon infini se joue le théâtre de nos affections is a sensory exploration that interacts with each individual.
It examines feelings, desire, the world, our time, a meeting for a day or forever, a departure, travel, a before and an after.
A constantly developing workshop of aspects and encounters in motion.
A world specific to the artist, touched by a duality where gentleness and a caress sometimes come up against coldness and fragility.
In cultivating that ambiguity, Joël Andrianomearisoa reveals to us the collective construction of an obsessive emotional architecture, sometimes dark, but above all sensual.

© Yanick Folly

ACT I

For the duration of a meeting or forever
headquarters of the Fondation Zinsou in Cotonou
The scene unfolds in a hotel somewhere in the world.
It is one of those grand hotels from another age, but excessively up-to-date.
From the reception to the gardens, from the wings to the stairs via the rooms and ballroom, glances dart and bodies meet.
Heartbeats – A fragile instant.
In time with these tremors, mirrors negotiate with our loving images.
A wild bouquet embraces the song of the distant land.
In a sentimental waiting room, sheets strive for perfection.
The drama of our society plays out In the Ballroom.
And a feast in the stylish restaurant already heralds the end.
Off to the station, the harbour, the airport…

ACT II

The Last Kiss
– Jardin d’Essai – Ouidah road-
“There, we curl up,
dream of the world
and above all exchange a last kiss
before sinking into the black light of oblivion.”

ACT III

After
Oblivion
Ouidah Museum
After the encounters come separations. Some will leave, others remain.
A boarding gate, a station platform, a landing stage at night, all buzzing with a thousand farewells.
Whilst upstairs, solitude is present in absence. Black tears are illuminated by the light of forgetting.
The gardens conjure up wonderful memories; handkerchiefs in the wind welcome our tears.
What eyes your eyes are, distant, so distant, so distant in the darkness.

 

Joël Andrianomearisoa

LE PLI
FUNDAÇAO LEAL RIOS . LISBON . PORTUGAL
2018

Curator : Miguel Leal Rios

In this exhibition, Andrianomearisoa presents works that, in several ways, are declinations of the possibilities of constructing spatialities that, generated by a process of repetition, establish the several declinations of our lived space, which is anisotropic. In fact, this selection of large format pieces, and a sound work that reinforces the project’s spatial nature, proposes both an intensity based on repetition and a hapticity that emerges from the sensual sophistication of the rigorous choice of materials, from their achromatism, and from our craving to touch them.

Waiting for the seventh day that will bring us together in the rest hours of the night (2011) is a sculptural set composed of twenty-four elements on a wall, shaping a tension between its material (paper), its near-weightlessness and the massiveness created by repetition (the iteration of paper sheets). This tension is antinomic; repetition, mass and weightlessness op- pose in the creation of an interstitially that cuts across the entire exhibition.

© Bruno Lopes

LES SAISONS DE MON COEUR
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2017

For Les saisons de mon coeur, Andrianomearisoa has borrowed the title from a poem in the book Petals By Malagasy writer, poet and critic Elie-Charles Abraham, an activist of nostalgia certainly resented with his exile when he wrote this book of poems in 1940, which is divided in the seasons of the year. This book of poems, interestingly written in French during colonization of Madagascar, evoques with nostalgia Antananarivo under French occupation in poems that talk about seduction and sentimentality. In his texts Abraham portrays life like flower petals, delicate and everchanging with the seasons, reactive to darkness  and to time.

Les saisons de mon coeur is divided in two parts: light and time. The first part of the exhibition holds recognizable textile works by Andrianomearisoa, which are an evolution from his series of silk paper works The Labyrinth of Passions. In this new body of work, Andrianomearisoa retains the technique of his labyrinths, with their repetition and their accidents, to create representations of the four seasons soaked in the essence of his practice. These works, painstakingly sewn by hand with strips of found sophisticated and regular textiles, are hung on a structure, as if they were paintings, connecting the upper and lower levels of the gallery, This structure, which reminds us of the artist’s education as an architect.  appropriates of the gallery space and mutates it into a body furrowed with veins: the veins of life and of time, an announcement, that will transport us through landscapes of different horizons, in a promenade which is life itself, into the lower level of the gallery,where the second part of the show is revealed.

© Sabrina Amrani gallery

The second part of Les saisons de mon coeur will surprise those who know Andrianomearisoa’s practice. Just like in our own lives we have to break things and put ourselves out of our comfort zones to progress, the artist is exploring what happens in the space between l’aller et le retour. In the basement of the gallery Andrianomearisoa deploys with a new found language, the real seasons of his heart, the different periods of his life, reflections of personal times, becoming artwork through a new medium in the artist’s practice: the embrodery. The temporality of the embroderies allow for deep reflection during production, and connect with the metaphor of the seasons, while representing obsession and passion, in cue with Art Brut and artoutsider Jules Leclerq, who after having been hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital, began collecting threads and pieces of cloth during his working hours in the laundry, to later compose complex and baroque embroideries in the insulation of his cell.

The fifty embroderies that compose the second part of Les saisons de mon coeur tell a story where time is treated like an everchanging line, like landscapes, a breathtaking sunset, the waves in the ocean or the snow on the mountain. But the surprise comes with the lively colors used to create these embroderies, which is a novelty in Andrianomearisoa’s practice. Very much like Allighiero e Boetti with his azzaris and mappas, Joël designed these works but handed over the process of selecting and combining the colors of the found threads to the embroiderers in his studio in Madagascar, forming an accidental aesthetic for each work. 

Andrianomearisoa’s Les saisons de mon coeur is a depiction of the different beats of our hearts, a rendering of the writing of our own lifes, that calls upon being more felt than understood. He is telling a different story about his new life and work, the new materials he is using, in a new life found: the dead tree of his new life. 

LE LA TOUR DU MONDE
GALERIES LAFAYETTE . PARIS . FRANCE
2017

Hosted by the Galeries Lafayette department store for Africa Now, Joël Andrianomearisoa presents a poetic whirlwind under the emporium’s dome.
Galeries Lafayette welcomes its customers to an impressive showcase, plunging them into an irrational, enchanting scene that provides a unique experience. The brand invites artists and creators to present original works in its store and under its dome to enhance and transform its architectural heritage.
The ‘world tower’ is made up of flags, accounts and words from Africa. But they are from a living, daring Africa, free of imagery. The project is structured as a poetic playground that encourages visitors to lose themselves in it.

SENTIMENTAL PRODUCTS
MUSÉE LES ABATTOIRS X GALERIES LAFAYETTE . TOULOUSE . FRANCE
2017

Curator : Annabelle Ténèze

Joël Andrianomearisoa has created a Sentimental Gift Shop for the Contemporary Floor, 40 years after the Sentimental Museum and Absurd Boutique that Daniel Spoerri planned for the opening of the Centre Pompidou. In an intimist manner, Andrianomearisoa also invites us to follow him through the different areas of the museum, from the restaurant to the bookshop via the courtyards and even the city streets, bringing meaning and words to the forgotten space of Les Abattoirs. He guides us down a string of sentimental paths, leaving traces of his passing here and there with texts displayed on the walls, love letters slipped into books… In the media library, his ‘Sentimental Library’ explores the nature of the place, in time with games of love and chance.
Planned as a general project, the ‘Sentimental Products by Joël Andrianomearisoa’ are developed throughout the exhibition and its accompanying events (posters, social media, Sentimental Party, etc.). They continue until the dispersion of the ‘Sentimental Boutique’ on the last days of the exhibition, because “while the items are for sale, feelings are free.”

© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa

LA MAISON SENTIMENTALE
BIENNALE DE DAKAR . DAKAR . SENEGAL
2016

Curator : Simon Njami

Increasingly, the glue of time slows the turning pages of a history with a small ‘h’, ranging from contemporary African art to contemporary African expressions. Paternal instinct fades and returns as filial instinct. Today, we are not the fathers of Revue Noire, but its children, so much has a span of time we thought eternal closed in around that venture of another way of knowing and discovering. Ultimately, with an unsuspected effect: lineage. The future?
The moulds of personal ambitions have replaced our plethora of collective ambitions. Yet without reducing the fertility of time, of each time. Sterility is still the persistent prerogative of our society, of those who think they can understand and control it by remaining at a distance and observing what can no longer be and even less will be. Attempting to put into words concepts that refuse to be confined to them. For the world of forms is genuinely the sphere of concepts that cannot be trapped in the equation of words without literature.

Here in Dakar for the biennale that has been so dear – even essential – to us since its creation, our concrete relationship is reaffirmed by Joël Andrianomearisoa. He has gathered the components he needed to build his ‘Sentimental House’ from both his personal world and the great library of partial or entire illustrations from Revue Noire,
Fragments, materials, words lost and found, a new music of forms in thousands of full and empty, small and vast pages accompany us through this long building transformed into a gallery. It is not a Hall of Mirrors reflecting our own image, but a promenade where we are plunged wholly into the depths of the mystery.

Jean-Loup Pivin

DE PROFUNDIS
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2015

Sabrina Amrani Art Gallery presents De Profundis, the first exhibition at the gallery of Malagasy artist Jöel Andrianomearisoa, leading the viewer almost blindly through a journey from light to darkness; from the primeval dawn of life to mysterious indescribable loss.
In this new exhibition, Andrianomearisoa continues his earlier engagement with the realities of love, their crude manifestations of borderless desire bound up with the most abysmal faces of the world: violence, domination, longing, cruelty, effacement. De Profundis, taking cue from Oscar Wilde’s eponymous prison letter (1897), is not an approximation to but an affirmation of the sinister power of love, its élan vital.

© Sabrina Amrani