Cristof Dènmont’s paintings are palimpsests. They plumb the depths of painting. They bring traces and gestures to the surface, put colour and lines on the same level, figuration and abstraction on equal footing. The artist, who has been active on the Réunion art scene since the 2000s, has remained loyal to traditional painting (acrylic or oil on stretched canvas) for two decades while also fully embracing a more contemporary approach. In doing so, he highlights a number of signs by combining codes from various worlds : symbols of the industry of mass consumption, coconut trees and pineapples as stand-ins for exoticism, and even traces of what painting produces. He questions and revisits great themes in the history of painting and creates his own language marked by a balance of impure blends. While it may seem uncanny, it is in fact an art of thickness – the kind that happens inwardly and comes to us with strange ease. By reactivating these scores, the artist writes his name down in History. Cristof Dènmont is a painter but he works, compiles and mixes as a musician does. His painting preserves the world’s multiple melodies, whether singing or screeching.

Extract from Painting Is the Enigma, by Diana Madeleine, 2022
Translated by Lucy Pons + Biographical notes translated with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques - Cnap.

Stéphane Kenkle’s painting focuses mainly on the depiction of the human figure and family portraits. His subjects, which he presents as half-length or full-length portraits, are painted in Fauvist colours with eyes wide open, suspended in pattern-studded spaces. Their attitudes seem to indicate that they are posing as they would in a photography studio, as if they were trying to give the impression of a “respectable” family – a tightly knit clan in which roles are assigned and performed according to the norm. But then one notices a hand hidden behind someone’s back, a foot bent inwards, or a tense clasp. A feeling of unease cracks the image and gives the fabricated nature of the reunion away. The backgrounds of the portraits, covered in vines, stars or embroideries, play an integral part in the decorum of these strange schemes (as confirmed by the titles of the pieces: Family with vines, Family with clover, …). Stéphane Kenkle scratches away at the varnish of the icons that stand on our shelves and urges us to perhaps reconsider these frames and the people who inhabit them.

Marie Birot, 2020.

« Pour Christiane Fath, l’ornement n’est certainement pas un crime, il serait même le vecteur par lequel elle parvient à développer une mosaïque complexe dont les formes prennent souvent leur source dans une histoire qui n’est pas forcément linéaire. Il en résulte un ensemble dense et complet où les éléments se répondent les uns les autres, comme autant d’indices imprévisibles, à la croisée de territoires multiples (le pourtour méditerranéen, Madagascar, La Réunion…) et d’histoires panachées (l’errance forcée, la stigmatisation, les liens troubles entre l’Occident et l’hémisphère Sud…).
De ses années de formation, Christiane Fath a su tirer le meilleur parti pour cultiver et développer sa curiosité envers un monde en constant changement.
En embrassant aussi bien la peinture, le textile, l’installation et la performance, la pratique artistique de Christiane Fath est effectivement à la croisée de différents chemins, tant personnels et biographiques qu’ouvrant vers de nouveaux horizons, sur le monde et ses métissages. »

Marc Bembekoff

Soleïman Badat’s plastic compositions are elastic and modular. His drawings and paintings use dark humour, while his photographic and videographic work adopts a more documentary posture that takes a critical look at what constitutes an event and therefore impacts our understanding of the world. His experimental research brings about a multitude of raw materials, which the artist delves into, arranges and mixes to generate “glitches” – parasites that infiltrate sound and image until the information they convey becomes “gritty” – and in doing so gives rise through its very substance to controversial and harsh subjects. Balanced between a degree of dreamy and contemplative optimism and a pragmatic awareness of their natural, societal, economic and political surroundings, Soleïman Badat’s works constantly oscillate between forms that are both resilient and chaotic, or enchanted and degenerative, and implicitly encourage a form of revolt.

Leïla Quillacq, 2020

While Tiéri Rivière may not favour any specific medium and effortlessly shifts from video to installation to drawing to volume work, the same attachment to the idea of balance runs throughout his work, as he experiments and researches this notion in pieces based on tension and potential collapse. By materialising the expectation for a situation to occur (or not), the artist plays with time and with the way it will affect the viewer’s perception of the art. This temporal variable plays a part in the creative process, whether through the idea of suspension or the idea of repetition. This is especially the case in his videos, all of which follow the same production principle: short, looped sequence-shots of simple and often funny situations, producing burlesque overtones that appear implicitly throughout his entire body of work.
Objects occupy a central position in Tiéri Rivière’s works. Many of these depict the artist playing around with an object. The objects used are simple: a basin, a cinderblock or a sheet of corrugated iron, are all parts of a playful and intuitive plastic vocabulary that grows in time.
Tiéri Rivière’s works are characterised by their economy of means and their precise craftsmanship. This process is also found in the way he constructs his volumes through the use of simple workmanship or minute assemblage (Voyaz, Radeau, Bureau …), as well as in his drawings, in which blank space has a plastic quality, in that it stands out from its base and allows a graphic tension to linger: is the figure emerging from the blank surface or is it going to dissolve in it?

What could a « Braille nipple kit », little walls made out of sugar cubes and a film showing the escape and torments of a Creole woman on the peaceful banks of a river possibly have in common ? At first glance, Leïla Payet’s work seems evasive, indescribable and hard to figure out. Just like the artist herself, it is made up of a wide range of forms and questions, chaotic and complex, the product of ceaseless ricochets, indicators of her extreme receptiveness to the world and nebulosity. Her work should be understood as the unfurling of a (plastic) way of thinking that develops as layers, from her performance pieces to her research projects on the makings of culture and of its narratives. From the experience of solitude to the great dance of life. But in order to analyse it, one must first force oneself to eliminate any and all attempt at generalisation and approach it as scattered fragments. Only then does her enigmatic output reveal itself as a « construction » in which each work never ceases to question and renegotiate art’s relation with society.

Extract from She Is an Island, Indescribable and Indivisible - Language and Space in the Work of Leïla Payet, by Diana Madeleine
Translated by Lucy Pons + Biographical notes translated with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques - Cnap.

Painting is Stéphanie Hoareau’s medium of choice. Since the start of her career, she has painted the hidden parts of the Réunion Island by exploring its scenery and residents. […] The artist explores both natural and urban areas, which are conducive to observing different types of fauna. In 2012, she began to work on a large-scale project centred around the fringe figures of the Island […] – people living in the margins of society and regarded with a mixture of suspicion and fascination. These figures have given rise to many a legend and are the subjects of a multitude of rumours, tales and anecdotes. […] From photographs to paintings and from sculpture to video, there is something captivating about the intensity of their eyes. The confrontation of gazes – theirs and ours – elicits equal degrees of fascination and unease. Rather than focus on the marginality of these figures, Stéphanie Hoareau prefers to consider the freedom and frailty of the lives they live on the borders of the organised reality of society.

Julie Crenn, excerpt from TEXTES CRITIQUES SCÈNE RÉUNIONNAISE, 2019.

This is a monkey that does not run on its hands and feet, but rather on vital energy and on the vivid memory of its prehistory. Chloé Robert has brought it to the surface using her claws. This is why a dark blade can be felt implicitly cutting through her work. There is a lost world shaking its mane at the surface of the paper. Her artistry comes out of nowhere and it has no time for politeness. In doing so, Chloé Robert strips her practice from academic teachings and their codes. Her method involves her looking for a path to her own source, without waiting for intellectual validation. The act of drawing, which is prevalent in her work, always hinges on the first line that springs from her fingers: if it happens to be there, it is because it is necessary, as are animals and what we call Nature. The figures that appear in her drawings are most often depicted facing the audience. One truly feels looked at, called to, as is the case with her piece depicting a lettuce-man with his hanging tongue and unflinching gaze. He lives in a dimension that is his and his own species’ – a fact that automatically take us back to our own individual and collective selves, to our way of being human within the world. Another plant-like being looks at us sorrowfully. He seems disappointed in the broken promises of existence. He misses Nature – the real one, the pure one, the ideal one – and remains staring at the chasm of this impossible return. “But it’s all just a dream”, says Chloé Robert.

Marie Birot, 2021.

Kako spent his childhood in the heights of the Réunion Island, surrounded by the omnipresent lushness of nature. From a young age, he developed a keen interest in these surroundings and became particularly fascinated by trees. By observing them, he detected signs, movements, and a surprising form of language. And so trees have become reference figures in his art. In his drawings, paintings and installations, the silhouette of the tree outlines space, reframes the image, and seems to stand between the viewer and the scene that is unfolding behind its branches. The artist uses the analogy of the root system to address the history of the people of the Réunion, which he calls “The New World” because of the forced nature of its cultural mixing. Pushing his investigations further into the Indo-Oceanic region, he manages to convey the sense of poetry and wonder born from the friction between his imagination and the fragments of worlds that have slipped between his roots.

Marie Birot, 2020

Jean-Claude Jolet develops his projects as an observer of the world and of its social constructs. While initially trained as a sculptor, his work ranges from photography to architectural installations and conjures up a form of human dramaturgy through the mise en abyme of cultural or political objects. While avoiding any direct collision, Jean-Claude Jolet’s works whisper to anyone who wants to listen a potential new way of the world, in perpetual construction, motion and folds. Built with a variety of manufactured materials, as well as raw natural elements, they are organised into simple and delicate “mental sculptures” put together with the precision of a skilled technician, the ingenuity of a handyman and the sensitivity of a poet.

Laetitia Espanol, 2020

Esther Hoareau’s works prompt a reflection on the relationships between Nature and Humankind. Her videos, drawings, photographs, texts and performance pieces highlight the different ways in which the body exists within scenery (terrestrial, celestial, marine, cosmic). From a perspective that is at once poetic, playful, spiritual, philosophical and sensitive, the artist addresses the notion of the sublime – of what we are unable to physically or conceptually comprehend. To the finiteness of the island, she opposes the idea of escape and diversion. […] Esther Hoareau draws from an imaginary world that is partly derived from her experience of the island, of her journeys (physical or mental) and of the observation of her surroundings (both its details and its immensity). […] This ambivalent combination of fascination and concern is present in most of Esther Hoareau’s output, in which she meshes together wonderment, rekindled delight and powerfulness with a sense of the uncanny and the unknown.

Julie Crenn, excerpt from TEXTES CRITIQUES SCÈNE RÉUNIONNAISE, 2019.

Alice Aucuit’s preferred medium is ceramics – a traditional craft that she combines with contemporary transfer and reproduction techniques. Working in series with evocative titles, she lays the groundwork for production by immersing herself in a location and its history with which her works can interact. Archéologie absente (Absent Archaeology), Parodie (Parody), La part des anges (The Angels’ Share) and L’écho des Berceuses (The Echo of Lullabies) each tackle a heritage that is both visible and invisible, and which serves as a starting point for new narratives. “I unpick fairy tales, myths and current news items, and use them to weave anachronistic and syncretic stories that I embroider onto the canvas of Humanity”, she says. From the intimate to the universal, from the sacred to the popular, these stories feature love, creation, femininity and death, and end up resonating in the collective unconscious. These topics are deeply visible in the hearts and bones of the series Kèr and Bone China, which carry an implicit memory of bodies and fairy tales – cathartic, like as many vanitas.

Leïla Quillacq, 2020.

Migline Paroumanou is one of those artists who stand against the disenchantment of the materialistic, consumerist, secularised and globalised world by cultivating a particular relationship with otherworldliness, perception and sacredness. Her art takes shape amid a landscape of disrupted beliefs, which continue to play a part in the invention of new forms.
There is something almost ritualistic in her gestures, which materialise into forms both symbolic and intuitive. Sculpted in ceramic and porcelain, they brim with spirituality, as if they were trying to survive our limited and perishable existence. Her work is both phenomenological – that is, imbued with lived experience while also attempting to give form to phenomena that manifest the invisible – and steeped in Eastern and Hindu philosophies, whose various figures and worships embody a similar expression of a divine and ultimate beyond. (…)
Therefore, Migline Paroumanou’s practice seeks to examine the way in which art continues to attest to something that lies beyond ordinary matters, to an irrepressible need for detachment, abstraction and elevation.

By Leïla Quillacq
Extract from a text soon to be published.
Translated by Lucy Pons + Biographical notes translated with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques - Cnap.

« Brandon Gercara is a non-binary person, zoreole (a zorey mom and a creole dad). They live and work in La Réunion where they have been active (…) in a militant artistic reflection focused on feminist, decolonial and LGBTQIA+ struggles. This is mainly translated into performative actions, such as, for example, the project PD - Pour Demain in which the artist incarnates a political figure in campaign. (…) Gradually, the project has evolved and now bears a generic name: Requeer. It is a platform for collective thoughts, a militant and artistic association at the heart of the Reunionese society. (…) Resources, models of identification and accessibility to this information are placed at the heart of Requeer. (…) Brandon Gercara, in alliance with their accomplices, injects their artistic reflection in the heart of society to deconstruct the sclerosing binarity, dominant models, oppressions and assignments. It is then a question of carrying a collective strategy of the joy to transform this violence into a both emancipating and vital force. »

Extracts from « Brandon Gercara » by Julie Crenn, Salon de Montrouge 2022

The duo of artists Kid Kréol & Boogie (Jean-Sébastien Clain and Yannis Nanguet respectively) has been active since their teenage years. […] Their graffiti were at first inspired by 1970-1980s American street art, before they gradually broadened their style with the addition of references drawn from the culture and history of the Réunion Island – a history marked by an emptiness that the two artists apply themselves to fill, inhabit and re-embody. With this aim in mind, they have developed a mythology made up of sceneries (terrestrial and celestial), gods, goddesses, hybrid beings, and human and animal monsters. Their Mountain Men and Universe Men encourage us to imagine the geological and mythological origins of the island. […] They extract phantasmagorical and hallucinatory figures, energies, spirits and ghosts from the surrounding nature and from the everyday elements of their lives. These entities (human, animal, vegetal, mineral) generate a space that opens up the potential for the multiplication and creolisation of new narratives.

Julie Crenn, excerpt from TEXTES CRITIQUES SCÈNE RÉUNIONNAISE, 2019.

Yohann Quëland de Saint-Pern’s work questions the object, the body, the discourse and the notion of public space, as well as the power relationships at play within their various incarnations. Well-organised constructions and standardised compositions are all archetypes designed as conveyors of efficiency for the economy, production and reproduction, the circulation of people and goods, and as injunctions to adapt, therefore impacting our imagination. Statements, archives, images and protocolar objects circulate from piece to piece in works that are often “expandable”, and echo the political, economic and social histories and realities of territories impacted by post- or neo-colonialism. The works that stem from the artist’s research “highlights the parties involved” and in doing so topple the invisible burdens they carry. For Yohann Quëland de Saint-Pern, to create is to “invent the tools needed to open up perspectives and cultivate one’s territory like a field of new possibilities”.

Leïla Quillacq, excerpt from a text and interview with the artist, for documents d’artistes La Réunion, 2020.

Anne Fontaine uses the garden in its wild state as grounds for observation and sociological and graphic research. Working within a circumscribed area, she collects plants and classifies them as she would a herbarium. This methodical picking expresses and runs throughout her thought process and her examination of movements of human populations and the conditions in which we are able to live together as communities. She then uses drawing, photography, painting and wallpaper as mediums to convey the various stages of her research and findings. In the end, her pieces become graphic and poetic theorems of the living world. Anne Fontaine does not use this technique simply as an effective and clever way of presenting her observations. Instead, she uses a sensitive and intuitive language, poised between what is unknown to us and what we are able to refer to. Her creations are hypotheses that do not seek to convince but rather to question, to make us do with what we see. One is drawn to her work because of its beauty, its contained, precise and structured workmanship and, by extension, the various feelings and thoughts we experience mirror the outlines of her intricate and demanding work.

Marie Birot, 2020.

An unrelenting struggle between primitiveness and culture, as well as between inside and outside, is at play in Pascale Simont’s sleeping bodies, whether these are lost in a dream state or contorted in shock. Faces are a common element in the artist’s work, like internalisations and incarnations of her recurring abstract digressions, or expressions of deep feelings. At the slim border between what is and what should be, the tumefied bodies seem to be caught between two states – that of the social being that one builds from childhood, and expected to become embodied either in the form of a woman, a mother or a housewife, but also as an athlete or as the primitive, instinctive animal body. The composite paintings, videos or objects that Pascale Simont creates are as many sketches, questions and attempts to build around this duality. Sometimes, the borders and horizon of the island on which Pascale Simont has lived since 2000 seem to insinuate themselves into the artist’s work, like echoes of this inner fiction.

Laetitia Espanol, 2020.

Both hilarious and solemn, Jean-Marc Lacaze’s work feels like a slap to the back of the head. The artist exploits the qualities of multiple mediums and materials to create connections between codes and motifs borrowed from various cultures as well as from history and current events. This confluence gives rise to a singular and candid graphic language. The gap between the neatness of the aesthetic and the straightforward brutality of the subject matter generates a narrative tension that overbalances stances usually described as politically committed – when they in fact serve only those who take these stances. Jean-Marc Lacaze’s posture consists in calling people out and making room for debate with undeniable generosity, rather than being provocative out of a sheer taste for style. In this sense, his work constitutes a plastic form of dark humour that combines raw sensitivity and high intellectual standards to urge us to take a hard look at the constant “what the fuck” feeling in which the observation of human activity immerses us.

Marie Birot, 2020.

KMVH is a young multi-faceted artist whose work explores the way in which aspects of relationships – to oneself, to others, to space and to the world – can sometimes become stuck, stutter or hinder, become muddled, be avoided or confronted, fall apart or be rectified, work their way through us and affect us. The artist has developed a photographic and video-performative body of work in which she stages herself, as if to foil the plots of a personal mythology of exile. The implicit notion here is the question of the frames of reference that we hand down, erect or demolish, and build ourselves upon. The question is that of identity: what causes us to act a certain way, and how do we fit in elsewhere? KMVH’s work aims to highlight various life stories. Whether intimate or collective, they are at times dented but always resistant; in search of lost spaces, beings or words; hidden under suitcases; forbidden or obvious; sweated out through the hands or shouted out through the eyes, and finding an incarnation here, in a work in action and in search of sharing.

Leïla Quillacq, 2020.

Embroidering, stitching and unpicking, as if one were doing nothing: these are the types of “non-actions” or “counter-actions” that make up Myriam Omar Awadi’s work. Using writing, drawing, images and performance, the artist weaves the fabric of ordinary romances “of which nothing is left but embellishments”. Esthétique de la broderie, (IN)ACTES and Paroles Paroles are bodies of work designed as research and creative laboratories in which language and silences, and bodies and absences become concrete materials and subjects for potential narratives. As the artist uncoils the thread of whatever resists in her gestures, in the object or in the depiction, a motif appears in the background: a blue flower, like a eulogy of nothingness, a symbol of hidden desire. The flower gradually makes way for the sequin, which reflects the light in the deserted space and adorns the night to make it shine. Myriam Omar Awadi’s work questions the ways in which we inhabit empty spaces by taking apart the spectacle, getting rid of what fascinates us in favour of what stings, and attacking the world… with a love song.

Leïla Quillacq, excerpt from a text and interview with the artist, for documents d’artistes La Réunion, 2020.

“A self-portrait is a strange way of becoming another.”

In addition to his practice of drawing, sculpture, photography, video and installation, Abel Techer’s primary output is painting. (…) The almost religious aspect of his mise en scenes, tinged with the persistence of everyday worldliness, as well as his many references to church painting, work together to create an intimate portrait of a Creole society permeated with the ambiguity of its beliefs, the potential porosity of spaces and the potential metamorphosis of bodies.
This is a form of painting in which the sublime and transfiguration coexist, as do the triviality of everyday bodies and objects, the sacred and the obscene, queerness (“the malleable properties of gender”*), realism and fantasy, imagination and dreams. From one painting to the next, Abel Techer shows us the very contemporary diary of his transformations. (…) Underlying connections repeatedly link his painting to vaster regions irrigated by the vivid unconscious of Creole societies. The succession of paintings composes a sort of coming-of-age narrative in which the painter’s body constantly transforms from one canvas to the next and, in doing so, comes closer to – at least in the biblical, if not magical sense of the term – a possible transfiguration.

Pierre-Louis Rivière, 2020.
* Judith Butler, Gender trouble.