ART CITIES:Paris-Paul Mignard

Paul Mignard’s syncretic paintings revisit the landscape genre from the depths of psyche and time. He is an explorer of the expanded consciousness, whose universe thrives on para-sciences such as alchemy, astrology, and the anthropological study of ancient oral traditions or folklore from across the world. His practice’s strong ritual dimension breaks away from Western contemporary canons.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Jérôme Poggi Archive

Paul Mignard’s solo exhibition “Nopal” is accompanied by two in-situ projects in the Jérôme Poggi gallery’s cabinets, by Cecilia Granara and Ittah Yoda, These two spaces offer a counterpoint to the main exhibition, and this time, are occupied by other emerging artists from the French scene, from the same generation as Mignard. Together, they offer a at young contemporary creation and, more particularly, at the relationship to the imaginary and to the landscape that it can maintain. Invoking a quasi-encyclopaedic logic, Mignard’s works bring mysterious and  strangely universal tales out of oblivion. The internal logic of the paintings, like alphabetical coincidence, places side by side the sacred and the profane, the figurative and the abstract, the immense and the intimate, the dreamlike and the realistic, refusing to develop a stable narrative. For Nopal, the last king of Ethiopia, Mexican banknotes and Jamaican records thus sit together with prayer rolls, astral maps and primitive landscapes, staging an imagery on the edge of time and space.  The very materiality of the works resembles a marvelous tale; that of a painter in search for ancient techniques, blowing gold, aluminium and copper powders onto linen canvases, emulsifying pearly pigments to evoke the mineral texture of stars, tracing perfect geometries with a compass, and sanding down certain surfaces to make primordial images disappear, which the future would then have the task of deciphering. Little by little, innumerable layers of paint appear, creating a golden mille-feuille that exudes a strong sense of sacredness. The mystery implies a particular type of relationship to the works. To look at a painting by Paul Mignard resembles an initiation ritual that also involves speech, and being introduced to forms of knowledge that one will take time to fully understand. This oral transmission echoes the content of the works: the ancient forms of knowledge that the paintings activate were first transmitted orally before being fixed on paper. The exhibition also marks the apparition of the color black in Mignard’s painting. Darkness naturally imposes itself as a place where the invisible can reveal what is hidden by the visible, what the para-sciences in which he is interested – astrology, alchemy, shamanism – allow to illuminate. But as always in his work, there is a much more concrete reference for the use of this color that belongs to our immediate reality: vinyls, which always accompany the artist in his work sessions and provides the content of several paintings in Nopal. The circle, the star, the tree, the nopal (or prickly pear) establish the framework from which Mignard’s imagination unfolds. The circle, for example, is infinitely varied, evoking at once the cell, the coin, the retina, the disc, and the star, giving shape to some elements within the works, as well as to the canvases themselves. This mix gives the works a mystical tone. This is reinforced by the materiality of the works but also by the meticulous precision with which each form is traced. The perfection of each line detaches us from the world of men and finds a resonance within the dreamy landscapes that form the backdrop to the paintings. Together, they bring us closer to something that would come from elsewhere, while at the same time creating an environment that would be at once matrix land, place of rebirth and return to nothingness.  Cecilia Granara was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1991. She is Italian and grew up in Mexico City, Rome and Chicago. Her painting draws on self-fiction, poetry and symbolic iconography. She is interested in cultural attitudes towards sexuality, the body and the use of colour as a vehicle for emotion.  Ittah Yoda builds their artistic identity through the digital medium, a vector of crossbreeding and transcultural creative hybridation. Their collaboration gives rise to real and virtual forms whose inspiration is drawn from nature, particularly in the symbiotic relationship.

Photo: Paul Mignard, Version, 2021, Pigments on free-standing canvas Diameter : 200 cm, © Paul Mignard,  Courtesy the artist and Galerie Jérôme Poggi

Info: Curator: Camille Bréchignac, Galerie Jérôme Poggi, 2 Rue Beaubourg, Paris, Frande, Duration: 6/11-23/12/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://galeriepoggi.com