Lalitha Lajmi made herself the subject of her own work for nearly six decades. Her face is immediately identifiable in her self-portraiture, repeated tirelessly across hundreds of artworks: sleek and moonlike, chin angled upward, gaping, heavy-lidded eyes. Her body leaps from one painting to the next, sometimes surveying the scene, other times orchestrating it, always with the same self-aware smirk, her mouth pitched to one side. Her likeness is symbolic and archetypal, and she fastidiously reconstructs herself. Sometimes riding a unicycle, arms aloft, juggling orbs. Dancing, buoyant against blurry, uncanny landscapes. Standing at the front of the frame, palms open, a benevolent maestro.

She taught herself how to paint, etch, and make prints; she was productive, dedicated, and meticulous. Lajmi’s fixation on representing the self was, in fact, a national preoccupation during her time. She was a teenager when India was first formed as a republic independent from the British Empire. She was a young adult making art during a time of post-independence euphoria, when the project of Indian decolonization was underway. And there was work to be done. Mythologies had to be built, the nation-state given a new identity. The task at hand—taken up by politicians, historians, artists, writers, and filmmakers alike-was to fashion India a selfhood.

Lajmi’s artist contemporaries were actively recruited for the task—public commissions, murals, and photo-ops with politicians. The first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, enamored with European modernisms, flew in Le Corbusier to design a new city made of plump slabs of concrete. A group of raffish young men who called themselves the Bombay Progressive Artists were the stars of a new Indian modernism. Some painted idyllic village scenes with a wistful romanticism; others worked in abstraction, with oblique shapes representative of Indian traditions and histories. Feminine bodies appeared in modernists’ works as stylized nudes or as bodies of labor: farming, tending to domestic work. But Lajmi painted herself.

Lajmi began undergoing psychoanalysis in her thirties, and she obsessively wrote down her dreams. She was plainspoken about her interest in analysis; it was not just a matter of self-introspection but one of pursuing the addition of surreal interpretation onto her painterly plane. “It is natural for me to examine my dreams for shaping my images,” she said matter-of-factly in an interview with the Sunday Times in 1993. Psychoanalysis offered Lajmi a set of tools by which to dissolve the slim separation between reality and fiction, both in waking and sleeping life. It was in her watercolors, especially, that she worked through the materials of her dreams; the soft, slippery nature of the medium allowed her to be ambiguous and free flowing. “Dreams clarify things… longings are expressed,” she said.

Lajmi’s art offers a rich profusion of her inner world. The material produced by the psychoanalytic method is, by nature, elusive: recounting dreams that are fleeting in spirit; admitting to the desires and impulses forbidden by normative society; or trying to identify motivations so disguised we remain blind to them. In her dream journals, Lajmi writes lucidly about the knottiness of her dream life. She is obsessive, and even hubristic, and like with her painting, she plunders the recurrence of certain paranoias and yearnings. Of these, her sharpest glance is at the loneliness produced by the modern family unit; Lajmi herself had an arranged marriage.

Lajmi’s work is not just a reflection of her inner world but also a product of her circumstances. As an upper-caste woman from a Hindu family, she had the social mobility to shape her own identity. What makes her compelling is that she was obsessed with fashioning a selfhood in public, and staging archetypes while doing so. In making herself the primary subject of her work—informed by the era of Indian independence and modernity—she showed how the political project of modernity entered the interiority of the mind.

Contemporary India is a violent place, the roots of which were laid out at the time of India’s forming. It has become imperative to look back to move forward, return to this time of decolonization, and to take off the rose-colored glasses. To build other tellings of the early shaping of the Indian nation-state. In looking at the work and dreams of a woman who found herself in one center of this political, intellectual and cultural moment (as there were many of these apart from Bombay, spilling throughout the subcontinent), we enter a dialogue with her. Lajmi’s use of the materials of the psychoanalytic method to make her work lends itself to a reading of the modern subject as one that develops a self-reflexivity, that tests the limits of the mind. Lajmi’s inner world, of which she laid out the pieces for us to follow, affords something singular and extraordinary: her paintings and writings build an alternate history to the one most often told. Lajmi plainly admitted to her instinct toward keeping record: “Since I am a product of my time,” she said in the Sunday Express in 2023, “I don’t have the desire to produce timeless works. They too will have their place in history.”

At the center of this history are the fears, paranoias, and ambitions of a woman—a mother thrust into a world that was suddenly made modern. The self-styled figures in Lajmi’s paintings are desirous and full of mischief. They often appear as tricksters, chaos-makers the archetype that flits most between moralism, codes of conduct, and societal structures. The trickster has the sharpest intellect, and access to secret and hidden wisdom. The self is a representational economy, and to build selfhood was a modern concept. A narcissism slithers through Lajmi’s art and writings. It is of consequence. It is an intellectual project that unfolds the psychoanalytic method itself: turning the self into a prism through which we can enter society.

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Excerpted from Lalitha Lajmi by Skye Arundhati Thomas, imagine/otherwise series, copublished by Sternberg Press and artPost21, 2024.

Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer and editor from India. Their new book Pleasure Gardens (co-written with Izabella Scott) on constitutional law and military occupation in Kashmir is out now with Mack Books, as is their third book, on the painter Lalitha Lajmi, with Sternberg Press. From 2021-24 they were co-editor of The White Review.
They are currently international curator-in-residence at the Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris.

We are pleased to present Guillaume Pinard’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

“La rue des mésanges” is the name given to this new set of large-format paintings, which Guillaume Pinard produced this summer, and which he will exhibit from October 16 to November 28, 2021.
In parallel to this exhibition, he will present “Pour Salir le Perron” at the Telmah contemporary art gallery, in Rouen, from October 15 to December 18, 2021.

I grew up in a Tits Street.

Do not look for Tits street in inner Paris, there is none. For that matter there is none in Lyon downtown, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille, etc.

Tits streets appeared à the end of the sixties, along the development of private housing estates in the suburbs of big cities. A Tits Street is a street without a history, with no link with the area where it stands. Very often associated with other passerines (bullfinches, goldfinches, warblers Streets, etc.) in a “birds estate”, this urban graft purposely promises its owners something bucolic; a street which pretends the mineralization of the land to be a rural project, and its ballasts earth to be humus, with Jardiland or Truffaut, dealers of biologic diversity on the way to work, in order to make one’s patch of garden a piece of nature.

I have been caught out on this dream, this zoning of an imaginative world, using a strictly market and implement language, where nothing puts out roots (an accessory, a tool, a machine for each gesture, each trip, a shop sign for each function). It is this franchised dream, this street even left a long time ago, that I am still fighting with and against, from where I speak, draw and paint this infected prettiness, this glut of landscape, the chained up bodies, a second hand colored-print trade.

Guillaume Pinard, 2021

Might Pierre Moignard be one of those extraordinary, derisory utopians still capable of halting the advance of an army of tanks?

As a barrage to the high-speed stream of pictures flooding us today, he raises the fragile breakwater of hiswry images. To the riders of waves and currents, he prefers the humble heroism of the beaver and builders of castles in the sand.

The words spoken by Julian the Apostate (taken from Ibsen’s play Emperor and Galilean) that open his latest film (Holyland Experience)—“The old beauty is no longer beautiful, and the new truth is no longer true”—unlock the meaning of his works.

The notion of “dialectical images” (in its complexity) provides a fair glimpse into the nature of Pierre Moignard’s works. Created consistently according to a principle of contradiction…(1)

Fiercely demanding of himself, Moignard has broadened and refined his artistic pantheon over the years. Guston, Titian, de Kooning, Goya, and, recently, Picasso, have inspired series of composite paintings; observing that the finest works of these “beacons” had drawn on their social observations or political beliefs, Moignard, from art’s ivory tower, was soon carving out the same niches… (2)

He has worked on numerous series of wide – and close- shot compositions, which increasingly and openly reference cinema. Several stays in Los Angeles and the discovery of Las Vegas forged connections between his painting and film set design, to the extent that he has had several of his paintings made by set designers. In these borderline works, painting seems to “forget itself” in cinema; the painter becomes apainter- filmmaker, recording the “forgetting” of painting…Yet if one records this forgetting, one can then remember and perhaps attain real life.” By way of cinema, the painter shows us images of forgetting, thereby putting us in touch with reality.(3)

A certain geometry in action is enough for him. This is what he has meticulously constructed in his paintings, period after period, driven by a need to go as far as possible and well beyond what might be said about it. In all these years, he has continued along his path as a painter, while I continue to accompany him,but nothing of what was already there at the very beginning—that is, everything—has disappeared. The painting existed then and still exists solely in its own presence.(4)

As we have seen, while Moignard’s works are produced using very different means and forms of artistry, itis never a question of style. The painter is convinced that he has something more intense than an author’s sole endeavor, and that this something is on the outside.

And so to take something that is already made or already there is not to quote; it is to invent other lives that are of interest only in so far as they open up a kind of window on the reality outside the painting. With Manet, Moignard tries to show us that “art is the expression of life.” And we share his belief that, in art, the imagination reinvents the ever-renewed conditions of this open window. The challenge for painting is not to confine it to its quality as a medium to be practiced to achieve a style. Or, worse, to limit it to uses that envision it as nothing other than a vehicle for the “storm of images” among others.(5)

(1) Didier Ottinger, Deputy Director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre de Création Industrielle, Paris , « In thesea of images », Ibid.

(2) Didier Ottinger, « Pierre Moignard, At the round about of history », Ibid.

(3) Catherine Grenier, Director of the Fondation Giacometti, Paris, « Pierre Moignard : The forgetting of painting », Ibid.

(4) Fabrice Hergott, Director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, « A geometry in action », Ibid.

(5) Véronique Giroud, Doctor and Professor of History of Art, « Ecstasy as such », Ibid.

From the beginning of the seventies on, Topor has had steady exhibitions in galleries. Today he is thought as one of the most important drawers of the twentieth century.

During an interview with Eddy Devolder in 1994, Roland Topor said, “ I laugh about what is tragic, reality gives me asthma. I am like a schoolboy who writes and draws, it is among human means to mess up paper. I like art, because it is a way to evacuate culpability and just keep pleasure.”

This exhibition is not homage, strictly speaking. The guest artists have not made new works for the occasion. It has only been a question of selecting drawings, paintings and films, by elective affinities, and finding connivances.

Topor explained he drew or wrote in order to find allies. This is only the project of this exhibition: to find, in these allies, the mind of Topor.

This exhibition is meant to be generous, rich and diverse, in his image, the opportunity to discover the works of 21 artists, as well as a set of drawings by Roland Topor.

Gallery Anne Barrault is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Daniel Spoerri’s works.
Since the creation of the Movement of New Realism in 1960, to which Daniel Spoerri belonged, this artist embodies a major figure of modern and contemporary art.

The son of Dada and Duchamps, Daniel Spoerri likes to unbalance order, the hierarchy of values, beliefs, and preconceived ideas. Art and life mingle, the world is potentially a work of art, everyday objects, those found, hackneyed phrases are as many ready-mades full of meaning, affect and aesthetic. Everything is fetish. Everything is ritual. Everything is art. You only have to present, to “trap” the thing, as such. What is trivial, unworthy, vulgar, trash, rubbish, doomed to death is put back, by chance, and mainly thanks to Spoerri’s will, into life cycle through art.
Daniel Spoerri, who is fully part of this movement, which claimed a “collective singularity”, published, in 1962, his first book, today a cult book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (re-edited this year by Nouvel Attila editions). In this work already, his friends Dieter Roth, Robert Filliou and Roland Topor intervened.

These exchanges with artists are a central feature of his work. This essential aspect will be seen thanks to the re-edition of a set of 22 postcards entitled monsters are inoffensive, first edited by Fluxus in 1967. In them, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou and Roland Topor take photographs, draw, and assemble.

40 years after “Crocodrome”, the inaugural exhibition of Centre Pompidou in 1977, in which Tinguely invited Daniel Spoerri to exhibit, for the first time, Le Musée Sentimental and La Boutique Aberrante, the visitor will be able to discover works done in the last thirty years, still never shown in France.

40 years later, this exhibition will be a unique opportunity to show Daniel Spoerri’s most important contribution, which has influenced artistic trends such as Pop Art, Fluxus, Neo Dada… and prove it is still at work today.