Door to the Cosmos — Galerie Mariane Ibrahim
Drifts of cosmic dreams and the depths of pain intersect in the new thematic exhibition at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Door to the Cosmos, with Nick Cave, George Clinton, Michi Meko and Zohra Opoku.
Drawn in from the very start by a shimmering cyclone by artist Nick Cave — whose ambivalent nature, based on the fusion of data from dangerous climatic phenomena and brain scans of young Black men suffering from post-traumatic syndromes, intertwines multiple symbolic fields — the visitor becomes lost within volutes and volumes of a plural nature. Anchored in the decorative vocabulary, from adornment to clothing, his materials merge here with the warmth of an organic system, shapeless and yet almost animal.
A similar drift is at work in the art of Michi Meko, who overlays the frontal representation of the celestial with the geometric abstraction of cartographic lines, the ornamental effects of a more romantic vision, and tangled fishing lines, as many points of reference as essential disruptions to an impossible harmony. Their title, Backlash, expresses the symbolic and historical weight of a wounded relationship with a discordant reality.
All reasons to imagine escape, even if the path remains tortuous. Thus, the visitor is next invited to confront the parable of the Judgment of Osiris, the trial in which Anubis weighs the hearts of the deceased, granting or denying them entry to the realm of the dead according to the verdict of his scales. Reinterpreted in a vibrant painting by Zohra Opoku, the parable becomes a challenge to rationality itself, confronted with the fragility of life, the delicacy of textile material, and the intensity of emotion, with the rigor of obsessive, knotted motifs submerged beneath the waves of an ocean turned into a theater of sidereal flights.
Abysses and chasms face one another in this spatial staging of a cosmos that unites transcendence with the carnal, the horizontality of immanence with the ether of allegory. From this fertile paradox, the exhibition offers a resolution, a deliciously delirious synthesis, through the surprising dog self-portraits of George Clinton, a major figure of modern music (among other things), whose free pictorial variations on this figure follow a unifying and positive vision of the world. The scenography of this final room, thoughtfully designed, shifts the ceremonial value of the painting medium and gives a remarkable vitality to this work, whose energy is profoundly contemporary.
A joyous and percussive conclusion to a beautiful journey that, through four singular voices deftly manipulating the discordant layers of reality and symbol, intertwines notions of creation, life, form, dream, invention, and deconstruction to rediscover a deeper unity, away from uniformity. That of a universal cosmos where feeling seizes the frame, compelling the gaze to confront what is most immediate, however harsh it may be; where life, survival, and death, by essence, feed and sustain one another more than they simply follow.
Door to the Cosmos: Group Exhibition, Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, 18 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris, Tuesday — Saturday, 11am — 7pm — 18 October — 13 December 2025
