Miryam Haddad : Désordres — Art : Concept Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 27 → February 24, 2018

Young artist, freshly graduated from Les Beaux Arts de Paris and settled in France since 2012, Miryam Haddad (Damascus, 1991) presents her first solo exhibition at the gallery Art: Concept, Paris between January 27 and February 24, 2018.

Selected on the occasion of the third edition of Artagon (international exhibition of art-school-students), Miryam Haddad has distinguished herself with her oils on canvas in formats competing with those of academic or sacred painting. The triptych composition that punctuates her production is also reminiscent of altarpiece panels. But the analogies stop at that. Freed from the principles of genre-hyerarchy, as well as from imperatives of proportions and rules of perspective, Miryam Haddad’s paintings are populated by facetious, even ridiculous characters, that indulge in all kinds of festivities and simple pleasures in a joyous chaos. A controlled disorder in perpetual movement which imposes multiple glances for the work’s reading.

There is something late Baroque or even Rococo in the abundant and falsely frivolous painting of Miryam Haddad. Her subjects find an echo in the motif of “fête galante (“courtship party”), those rural scenes that mix up dancers, beautiful ladies and shepherds, adorned with disguises and musical instruments, privileging pleasure and entertainment over all earthly considerations. However, Miryam Haddad’s protagonists of pictorial fables often embrace the caricature. Thus staged on such large formats, in situations of such great banality (sometimes as caught in flagrante delicto of triviality) they become completely grotesque. In a sort of injunction to which they do not seem to believe themselves, they engage in a parody of happiness that betrays a profound impossibility. Like this man fishing in an oriental patio fountain (L’intelligence, 2017). Or the trumpet player, who, with the help of his rooster, tries in vain to revive the deceased of the great triptych called Fête de la mort, 2018 (“The Feast of the Death”). Their emotions are also parodic and contradictory, indecipherable even, because pushed to such an extreme that we do not even distinguish between laughter and tears, joy or anguish.

In a mixture of triviality and fantasy, apparent naivety and melancholy, these characters camouflage and exacerbate a reality too ugly and cruel to be represented. The human figure is also treated in a rough way, deformed or summed up in a few convulsive brushstrokes that evoke the tormented traits of painters such as Chaim Soutine, James Ensor or Marwan Kassab Bachi. Unburdened by the pessimism of those who inspired her, Miryam Haddad claims, however, the positive power of the imaginary, an imaginary that invites us to flee the real without altogether denying it.