A form of life

For her first Parisian exhibition, Andrea Medjesi gives birth to a new “form of life” from her painting — A form of life that raises questions and provokes our way of looking at it.

At first glance, we see shapes. Organic and pure. We don’t know if they are human or alien. Alter or anti ego. Troubled and disturbing shapes. In touch with their environment.

These forms cannot remain fixed. They are on the move. We end up realizing that we are witnessing, between each painting, the evolution and transformation of the same form. Its metamorphosis.

It’s a feminine form. Who hatches. Then grows. Before aging.

Andrea Medjesi was inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis to describe this molting. In the Greek poet’s book, the female forms are always submissive and flouted. They are form-objects. In Andrea’s paintings, the shapes adapt and transform. They are malleable in order to survive better. And in an environment which also takes part in its own transformation, the forms seem to oscillate. Between love and loss. Between attraction and rejection of the atmospheres that surround them.

Andrea Medjesi has been inspired by science fiction – from Ridley Scott to Japanese avant-gardes – but also by her reading. From Foucault’s biopolitics to Deleuze’s “body without organ”. Passing through Bataille, Agamben, the surrealists, Rubens, Caravaggio. 

Andrea Medjesi likes to be alone to paint. She starts with a color, a tone - like this pigment called “Caput Mortuum”, taken from the colors of  a baroque earth, which serves as the basis of her paintings. Then she dialogues with her painting. She lets the painting resonate within her.

And she keeps, with its life forms, many open questions. Our relationship to the virtual, to the digital, to hybrid forms. How can we communicate what has been alienated? How do these new forms of life manifest themselves? Is there a metaphysics of these forms?

Through painting, Andrea Medjesi brings us to the answers that she has never stop looking for.

Boris Bergmann