Inès di Folco Jemni at Galerie Crèvecœur

Exhibition text by Amandine Nana, translated by Ion Monk I long closed my eyes to the light of the day To see only the red of my life long before, To relive the last dream before my birth. With this new series of paintings, gathered together under the title Elixir, Inès di Folco Jemni, plunges us into a between-two-worlds which touches at our most intimate memory of childhood. A space with landscapes and characters that are as troubling as they are comforting and which the artist previously named for a solo show in 2023 in New York as the last dream before birth. The omnipresence of red in her paintings evokes for the artist the protective interior of the mother’s womb as well as the first landscape experienced by the developing child. In Inès’s visual vocabu- lary, red means protection and life. And, on growing up, children who have become adults often continue to close their eyes in a quest for appeasement. When the eyelids are shut too tightly, so as to forget reality for a moment, black often gives way to red. I long closed my eyes to the light of day to see only the red of my life long before, to relive the last dream before my birth. The pigments that Inès uses in her painting leave nothing to chance, she handles them like an alchemist in search of a remedy, while being concerned about the sacred nature of these substances’ mineral essences. In her life, painting is an elixir destined to maintain love for her entourage now and always. As in the rest of her work, a biological or chosen family, ancestors, divinities and other tutelary fi- gures float within watery, volcanic and vegetal landscapes. In this series, we notably find a re- currence of the maternal figure and female forebears. In one of her small-format paintings in the series, there can be found, for example, Rosa, the artist’s great-grandmother who made mirrors. Here, she seems to be camouflaged in a flowery garden. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens...” for, as with Alice Walker in this essay originally published in 1972 before providing the title of a book in 1983, the African-American author and the artist search for fragments of lives inhe- rited from their female ancestors, to be retraced and claimed as their own creative genealogies, far from the canons of art history. In the last dream before being born, there was undoubtedly Rosa, there was already tenderness and the creativity of mothers. Love for an entourage, the love of art. And it is art, painting, this elixir, that takes her to the beauty of this truth. Each painting guides her in this quest for a quintessence of sensations in this space between dreams and reality. A particular space-time experienced inwardly but which is also mingled with visual hallucinations of exterior landscapes. In her work, landscapes at dawn and at night are characters in their own right whose upheavals, outbreaks and storms the artist recounts. There is often something vol- canic and insular in her painting, which has never been preserved from the threat of submer- sion. Lands and waters which we have poisoned infiltrate our dreams which contain a prescience of a hostile world in which we will perhaps one day have to learn to survive, even before being born. Inès paints with tenderness, love, nostalgia, but also with anger. The simmering rage of mothers who want to nurture and protect, and who refuse to wallow in a feeling of powerlessness. Her work is gentle and powerful, it touches our souls and awakens the seas wrapped up in- side us. If we listen to her paintings attentively, there is the echo of a wave in the middle of the night, and from this echo the distant chanting of the tales of our beginnings reaches our ears.