The Fondation Zinsou has given the artist Joël Andrianomearisoa
the whole of its spaces from the Foundation's headquarters in Cotonou to the Museum of Ouidah,
through a "carte blanche" entitled
SUR UN HORIZON INFINI SE JOUE LE THÉÂTRE DE NOS AFFECTIONS.
The first major solo exhibition of the artist on the continent and in Benin.
On an unprecedented rhythm, he invested the spaces: installations, words, objects, images, sounds and moods with the complicity of the entire team of the Foundation, people of friendship and local know-how.
SUR UN HORIZON INFINI SE JOUE LE THÉÂTRE DE NOS AFFECTIONS.
is a sensory exploration, in interaction with each one.
It is about feeling, desire, the world, our time, an encounter, one day or forever, a departure, a journey, a before and after.
A workshop in constant evolution with moving elements and appointments.
A world, proper to the artist, borrowed from a duality where softness and caress sometimes confront with
coldness and fragility.
By cultivating this ambiguity, Joel Andrianomearisoa gives us to see the collective construction
of a sentimental architecture obsessive, sometimes dark but especially sensual.
The "carte blanche" is built in 3 acts on three spaces
ACTE I
THE TIME OF A MEETING OR FOREVER
Joël Andrianomearisoa
Joël Andrianomearisoa
Joël Andrianomearisoa
Joël Andrianomearisoa
at the Fondation Zinsou headquarters in Cotonou
The scene takes place in a hotel somewhere in the world.
One of those great hotels of another time but excessively of today.
From the reception to the garden, from the backstage to the stairs, through the rooms and the ballroom,
looks dance and bodies meet.
Heartbeats - A fragile moment.
To the rhythm of these palpitations, the mirrors negotiate with our amorous images.
A crazy bouquet embraces the song of the distant land.
In a sentimental waiting room the sheets seek perfection.
In The Ballroom the theater of our society is played out.
And a feast in the mundane restaurant already announces the end.
On the way to the station, the port, the airport ...
ACTE II
THE LAST KISS
Joël Andrianomearisoa
Joël Andrianomearisoa
Joël Andrianomearisoa
at the Jardin d'essai de la Fondation in Ouidah
The garden welcomes for the first time a permanent installation imagined by the artist,
conceived between architecture, feeling and landscape.
The work is a metaphor for the public bench on which we meet.
An architecture both strict and rigorous that will live to the rhythm of the plant and feelings.
One loves there, one dreams the world but one gives there especially the ultimate kiss before sinking
in the dark night of oblivion.
ACTE III
AFTER
THE FORGETTING
Joël Andrianomearisoa
Joël Andrianomearisoa
Joël Andrianomearisoa
Joël Andrianomearisoa
at the Ouidah Museum
After the meetings here are the separations. Some will leave and others will stay.
A boarding room, a station platform, a pier at night rustling with a thousand goodbyes.
Then on the floor, the solitude is there, present in the absence. The black tears light up in the light of oblivion.
The gardens remind us of the beautiful memories, the handkerchiefs in the wind collect our tears.
What eyes your eyes, so far away, so far in the dark.
Joël Andrianomearisoa makes this exhibition beat through the forms and references that are dear to him, Jeanne Moreau who dialogues with Maria Bethânia but also Edgardo Cozarinski with Elie Charles Abraham.
A sentimental journey from Buenos Aires to Antananarivo through Paris and Porto Alegre.
But it is on the stage of Cotonou and Ouidah that the infinite desires are revealed.