La beauté sera CONVULSIVE
Mariana Bunimov
January 30th - March 20th, 2021
Michel Rein, Paris /1st floor
Installation views
About
"The universe" presented by Mariana Bunimov (Caracas, Venezuela 1972), in her first exhibition at Michel Rein Gallery places the viewer in the middle of a crossroad where, without hierarchy or apparent connection, thousands of images hailing as much from her imaginary as from her daily life, cross paths.
Defying any kind of criteria or absolute, the eclectic nature of her world is also the reflection of the spirit of our time, the zeitgeist: a fragmented and hybrid world where the permanent flow of many different and divergent images and data converge in an ongoing immediacy that goes beyond any given geography or time-frame.
Through the accumulation, re-appropriation and transformation of bits and pieces of multiple realities, Bunimov creates an eclectic world. Civic upheavals rub shoulders with childhood images, music, lovers, landscapes, modern ruins, personalities, martyrs, fashion, architecture, memories, hybrid-objects and hybrid-beings. After years of working on sculpture, video art, animation and installations, Bunimov once again offers a central place to painting, this time on paper.
Figurative painting, the pictorial gesture, the involvement of the body and the juxtaposition of subjects all combine in a tempo that contrasts with the constant speed of today. Bunimov fills these works with the pleasure of the slowness intrinsic to oil paint. A slowness that according to Boris Cyrulnik, protects...
The tempo of the pictorial medium, as well as Bunimov?s selective process, function like links, a unifying language of these many different fragments which are a mix of her dialy life, a historical x-ray and story-board of a science-fiction movie. Driven by a desire to accumulate and juxtapose, a desire present in her approach to her body of work since the beginning, Bunimov confronts these fragments erasing any boundaries. Her process of deconstruction lies beyond any label or category. Somewhere between fiction, dream and reality, her work allows no utopia, no morality, just a manifesto of extreme freedom..
In her book La Boulimie d?objets (Bulimia of Objets), Valérie Guillard stresses that the desire to accumulate helps to create a finite territory in which individuals will create proof of their own existence. Bunimov wants this territory to be global, hybrid, and hallucinatory. A territory that gives rise to the beauty of the haphazard encounters so strongly advocated by Lautréamont and the Surrealists. A beauty which, by way of incongruous blurring and mixture, causes a life regulated by reason, logic, habit and repetition of the same to explode. When all is said and done, a beauty which will be CONVULSIVE, or not (André Breton, Nadja)»
Angeles Alonso Espinosa,
January 2021
