Maria Adjovi, David Mbuyi — Les images ne dorment jamais / Imago numquam dormit — Nathan Chiche Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in 3 months: June 14 → September 13, 2025

The dialogue between David Mbuyi and Maria Adjovi presented at the Galerie Nathan Chiche’s Gallery takes shape in a space already steeped in memory: a former school designed by Jean Prouvé, a place of transmission that has now become a site of artistic exploration and emotional revelation. In this architecture conceived for awakening, their works open up a field of perception, where painting becomes at once language, prayer, and act of presence. Each in their own way, they reawaken disjointed images: for David Mbuyi, it is the memory of a seen image—photographed, then transfigured through painting; for Maria Adjovi, it is images of the past that return like persistent figures of the soul. Both remind us, in their own way, that images never sleep.

Two pictorial voices, distinct yet secretly attuned, interrogate what endures — the gaze of childhood, the persistence of memory, the survival of forms. One explores the visible in motion, capturing the moment in its momentum, unfolding color as a living energy. The other sculpts the invisible within stillness, turning the face into an inner sanctuary, and the gaze into a silent prayer.

In David Mbuyi’s work, painting is traversed by a gaze that does not judge, but discovers, captures, and seizes: a child’s gaze, in the fullest sense — that is, a primal gaze, untainted by prejudice, open to both wonder and unease. He does not paint memories; he paints what the eye has recorded in a flash, like an inner photograph. The bodies are caught in movement, in posture — never inert. They inhabit space, traverse it, sometimes merge with it. These are figures in becoming, reaching toward a world they question rather than control.

The face, once transposed onto canvas, is no longer a fixed figure. It expands, wavers, stretches into the pictorial space. David Mbuyi introduces a dynamic in which the surface seems unable to contain the subject’s impulse. There is overflow, transgression, as if the portrait seeks to exceed its own frame. Painting thus becomes a site for rewriting visual memory. What the gaze has fixed, the hand recomposes. What the lens has captured, the pictorial gesture reactivates. As Georges Didi-Huberman writes: “To see is always to see through. Through time, through gestures, through losses.” In David Mbuyi’s work, painting enacts precisely this labor of the gaze through — through the initial image, through memory, through matter. It is not memory that sleeps, but the image that keeps watch.

His work is deeply inhabited by vegetation — not as background, but as matrix. Foliage, vibrant greens, pictorial branching structures unfold on his canvases with the vitality of a world in germination. Nature in his work is alive, breathing, bursting forth. It does not frame the subject; it extends from it. Vegetation is memory and energy, rootedness and expansion. His use of color is abundant. It is not applied: it is expressed. Intense greens, sun-drenched reds, nearly liquid yellows follow an organic rather than geometric logic. His canvases convey a sensation of flow: everything is traversed by a vital force, a foundational energy.

Maria Adjovi, in perfect counterpoint, anchors her painting in ritual slowness. It is not movement that interests her, but inner vibration. Each portrait is a presence. These are faces that do not offer themselves to narrative, but to meditation. The gaze she paints is not descriptive, but initiatory. It holds a secret, a memory, sometimes a wound. And it looks at us — not to be seen, but to be recognized.

Her painting is profoundly spiritual, yet never dogmatic. It draws from a silent iconography, from a mystical interiority that transcends religion. Each canvas becomes a space for contemplation. The colors, vivid at first, gradually fill with opacity. These are layers, veils, strata — as if light passes through successive skins. There is a density here that is not heaviness, but depth — a call to slowness, to listening, to introspection. These portraits fix us like silent sentinels, charged with a gaze that never fades.

In Maria Adjovi’s work, the maternal figure is omnipresent, yet never presented frontally. It is found in the shape of the face, in the texture of the painting, in the silence of the eyes. It is not an image, but a presence. Her spirituality is not a stance: it is the very space in which the work unfolds. A spirituality of memory, of transmission, of care. Maria Adjovi does not paint to represent. She paints to connect. “I say that identity opens in relation, not in the solitude of being,” wrote Édouard Glissant. Her work is inscribed in this poetics of relation: a painting that speaks to the absent, that preserves, that watches.

Between the two artists, a silent, vibrant conversation emerges. Where David Mbuyi explores the external — bodies in tension, inhabited landscapes, chromatic pulsations — Maria Adjovi delves into the internal — gazes turned inward, colors that absorb light, faces like reliquaries. This exhibition does not oppose two aesthetics: it weaves a shared fabric between gesture and presence, light and shadow, vital impulse and the sacred. It situates painting in a fertile in-between: between the image as trace, and the image as threshold. For here, more than anywhere else, images never sleep.