Miryam Haddad

A palette of sharp, vivid colors; thick paint applied with brush and knife: such are the striking characteristics of Miryam Haddad’s pictorial work. Whether expressed in wide-ranging larger formats or smaller, more intimate ones, its power and agitated forms leap out at us. Mining a seam developed in recent years, her dense, shimmering oil paintings are nourished as much by western expressionism as by reminiscences from the east, as much by the paintings of Kokoschka as the world of the filmmaker Parajanov, endowed with a luminosity that bears the mark of the vision of stained-glass windows. Playing on degrees of density and transparency, they are inhabited by figures on the threshold of perception, and invite the viewer to be swept along by the curves and colors of a swirling chaos where nothing is what it seems.

It is a question of confronting the canvas, casting one’s gaze deep, taking one’s time, allowing digression to take over, drifting along until figures emerge, a glimpse of a face or of animals, like the human silhouettes and architectural forms discerned in the monumental La proie du soleil (The prey of the sun). A rumbling force beneath the surface gaiety, carried by an intense energy and honed titles that are as allegorical as they are enigmatic and open. Alongside this set of canvasses, the series of watercolors titled L’aube entre les mains (Dawn in hands) opens up other possibilities. A practice – reactivated during lockdown – that offers the artist scope for more experimentations. Here, Miryam Haddad explores solid and empty spaces, the whiteness of the paper, simple touches, no repainting. Delicacy of form, always on the cusp of legible.

In collaboration with FRAC Auvergne as part of the exhibition Là-bas, sur le ciel d’orage, Oct 2 – Dec 30, 2021 (curator: Jean-Charles Vergne)

In partnership with les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse