Galleries in Paris

TIZIANA LA MELIA

Broom Emotion,  

Curated by Franck Balland

It starts with the comb teeth, which have streaked the wet hair, greased with the gel agglutinating on the wooden handle, like sticky slobber, thick foam. There is too much of it, and it leaks from the body, through its lifeless ends, pushed out by the sweep of the hand, both firm and delicate.

In front of this image, which goes with the first solo exhibition of Tiziana La Melia in gallery Anne Barrault, a question arises, among so many others: Where do cosmetic surpluses go when they take leave from human beings? Letting my mind wander, I let myself imagine that some of them become clouds, gaseous masses intoxicating the air with evaporated care, leaving the flesh to its trivial solitude. Others, stubborn and viscous, must mingle with underground water, filth and a still larger chain of chemical and biological residue, and colonize them with iridescent puddles, reminding of rubbed, scratched, cleaned skins. Are the insects, birds and rats, when they go across these pools, disturbed by the smell? Do they also resort to tricks to make themselves more desirable?

I may as well warn you, I do not ask for clear or definite answers to the above questions. I will be satisfied with those which will take me farthest into the depth of what I am made to see, or read. As a matter of fact, in the same way, the title of the exhibition suggests a new avenue: “Broom Emotion”. You imagine these words are spoken in a warm and pervasive voice, at the end of an inflamed commercial advert the last shots of which would show the shape of a body astride a flying broom pass in front of the night landscape of a full moonlit sky. Memories of witches, of the odyssey of lonely women looking at the world from afar, a new gathering of characters appears, and with it, an imaginative universe instils beyond the exhibition.

If you can see, in these images, which surround you, some taste for semantic assembling, you must know that Tiziana is also a poet, and poetry – which does not come first with her, but at least, at the same time as anything else – acts, in the heart of her work, as a lever which upsets rationality, triggering off possible stories brought about by other shapes of power. The poetic path followed by Tiziana travels through territories as varied as daily and domestic activities, social relationship, literature, cinema, art or dreams. She is not set on any particular medium, using the opportunities given by a still or moving image, drawing, painting, sculpture or performance, in order to embody the different aspects of her relationship with her material and symbolic environment. Writing, a process which on the one hand releases the self-fictional character of this work, and, on the other hand, allows the birth of new potentialities to determine things, appears, as far as it is concerned, as the architectural frame supporting the whole creative work.

Above all, through these more or less abrupt collages of images, shapes and matter, and by means of these narrative drafts linked with her work, Tiziana makes scenes appear. Between the walls of gallery Anne Barrault, primed like a canvass, the inside space of which we would pace, the pieces enter into dialogue, on a background of pastoral allusions: the space is swarmed with hay bundles and the air is filled with a pleasant scent; sand is spread on the floor and up to the paintings, like the dust propagating in an old barn; broken egg shells, of such a size you wonder which bird would have laid them, are waiting, here and there, for something. This is like the scenery of a tale or a fable, whose missing words would let the objects take over the story, feed the evocative meanings, and thus maintain a folk tradition the memory of which vanishes. Stories of witchcraft, of farmyard, of pagan ceremonies with forgotten rites mingle with Tiziana’s vaporous, so characteristic touch, her comical feature, and this discreet, ageless kitsch that she combines with care.