ART CITIES: Paris-Mandy El Sayegh

Mandy El-Sayegh’s highly process-driven practice is rooted in an exploration of material and language. Executed in a wide range of media, including densely layered paintings, sculpture, installation, diagrams, and sound and video, El-Sayegh’s work investigates the formation and break-down of systems of order, be they bodily, linguistic, or political. She is particularly interested in exploring the Part-Whole relationship–how something significant yet unpremeditated emerges and comes into being through various smaller, micro-interactions or repetitions.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Mandy El-Sayegh physically demonstrates this by collaging disparate fragments, text, and found imagery, and layering them with materials like latex, rubber, and clay that mimic organic matter. Through simple, repetitive patterns such as a hand-painted grid or geometric molds, formal and narrative synthesis occurs that is not consciously intended or anticipated. In “Figure One”, her first solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, Mandy El-Sayegh creates an immersive experience encompassing painting, sound and multimedia installations. Featuring over twenty new works from the artist’s “Net-Grid”, “White Grounds” and “Piece Paintings” series, the exhibition investigates abstraction, material and systems of knowledge production to reveal paintings as layered and complex cultural bodies. Inspired by the layout of forensic pathology books, which illustrate the fragmented body alongside detailed descriptions, El-Sayegh’s work disrupts the relationship between text and image from which meaning is constructed. In her new works, El-Sayegh collates diagrams of magic tricks, images taken from 1980s anatomy books, poems, news items and advertisements to form the grounds for her paintings. Among the items are names of Israeli military operations such as Susannah and Sea Breeze, printed alongside fashion editorials and poems by William Blake. Converted into a more simplified visual form through a silkscreen printing process, the source material undergoes what the artist describes as a ‘violence of flattening’. This flattening of images is a visual reflection of the way El-Sayegh places personal, political and cultural references on an equal plane. The artist then obscures the fragments of image and text behind gestural washes of white lotion. In the “Piece Paintings” series this process is arrested sooner, leaving more of the ‘ground’ visible, in contrast to the “White Grounds” in which the information is barely visible. For the “Net-Grid”, works, she adds a further layer of a hand-painted grid in pink flesh tones, bruised with blue. El-Sayegh explains the relationship between the three series, describing ‘each body of work’ as ‘a stage in the processing of a whole.  The ground floor installation, centred around a medical dissection table covered in found objects and fragments from her workshop, will encourage forensic examination of the disparate elements that make up El-Sayegh’s “Net-Grid”, and “Piece Paintings”, which hang on the surrounding walls. Among the objects on the table, a phone screen playa a video featuring images of works by famous abstract painters such as Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter, alongside footage taken by the artist in a Colombian morgue. Titled “The Amateur” the 2019 video work is an important interpretive key to El-Sayegh’s practice. Upstairs, visitors are step onto an in-situ installation made with pages from Le Monde, Le Figaro and Financial Times newspapers. Chosen both for their aesthetic qualities and their stature as authorities on global finance and current affairs, these are laid on the floor and then covered in transparent latex, adding a tactile layer to the experience of the work. On the walls, a new series of “White Grounds” paintings contains fragments of text from French philosopher Roland Barthes’s 1977–78 lectures on “The Neutral”. Half hidden behind gestural smears of white paint, words and images form a bruised palette that envelops viewers in the more intimate first-floor gallery. Along with the floor installation, they encourage a visceral approach to El-Sayegh’s work, immersing viewers in an overflow of matter, sources and fragments, seeping through and violating boundaries.

Photo: Mandy El-Sayegh, Recombinant series (call for), 2020, Resin, oil silkscreened muslin, acrylic newspaper and wood in artist’s brass frame, Diptych, each: 54.6 x 47 cm, © Mandy El-Sayegh, Courteys the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, France, Duration: 24/11/2021-15/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net