Mon pays c'est la lune

… Unlike truth, which humanity has always sought as a single, monolithic vision and version, just as it has sought the meaning of life, dreams instead compel us to acknowledge absolute relativity and the possibility of holding plural meanings and truths that are not contradictory but complementary.

Dreams are fragments of wreckage resting on the seabed which, moved by the motion of the waves, are stirred among the sands in a continuous metamorphosis. They are divinatory objects that do not provide a precise indication but an open, enigmatic one.

In the twelve works, forms are pure, often uncertain, tending toward abstraction, ready to transform into something else, to become the substance of new dreams. Many figures recur for the artist: “actors” who are people, their faces often distorted like ghosts; then objects such as eggs, fabrics, or snow; and animals, cats, deer, and foxes, the latter true totemic apparitions, messengers whose presence and gaze open bridges and contacts, prompting an empathic and sensory dialogue with the viewer.

Animals observe us as sacred creatures, naked and ruthless in their unfiltered truth, while before them humanity stands naked in its unnatural fiction.

Derrida, in his reflection on the relationship between human and animal in L’animal que donc je suis (2006), spoke of this nakedness: “It is as if, naked before the cat, I were to feel shame.” If one must question the human–animal difference, one cannot disregard the animal gaze.

The uncertainty left by Mon pays, c’esta la lune is a gift of freedom, because in dreams one walks through the fog, and it is precious that it remain so: a place of possibility that has no need of boundaries or stakes.   

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Olga Gambari