Mohamed Lekleti — Galerie lilia ben salah, Paris
Nothing in Mohamed Lekleti’s painting is self evident. Contradictory adversaries and disproportionate figures twist and strain in ways that suggest both empathy and conquest, rescue and subjugation. At Galerie lilia ben salah, in what reads like a retrospective under the eye of Éric Mangion, the artist’s kaleidoscopic vision binds our shared humanity to the fragile moorings of his own imagination, in all its ambiguity.
Mohamed Lekleti — Poussières d’exil @ lilia ben salah Gallery from March 19 to May 31. Learn more Across this striking selection of about ten works, spanning multiple formats and styles, the same surge of emotion and invention competes for space at the forefront of scenes with shifting centers of gravity. The drawing, as agile as it is mischievous, embraces its own fragility and accidents to introduce a derealization of bodies thrown into the carousel of our contradictions. Styles jostle and bodies overlap. The drawing deliberately preserves areas of inconsistency, inviting the viewer’s imagination to enter visions that, rich in their own geometry, open onto dimensions other than our own. They strike and unsettle the rationality of a universe recomposed through play, unsettling by necessity.
Supports entangle their temporality with their form to set their relationships in motion. Archival documents sustain liturgical fictions. Mythological figures confront the exaggerated, almost Hollywood contortions of their counterparts. Chimeras with doubly augmented bodies further erode a humanity held together by the thread of its own hand. Through the exuberance of his inventions, the persistence of the links he draws between bodies, and the proliferation of numbers, letters and signs, Mohamed Lekleti offers a deeply literary body of work. Its narration is tightly controlled even as its framing leaves room for the play of all the stories viewers may choose to project into it.
In this suspended world, everything withers and stretches, buckles and thins. Nothing quite holds, yet everything, somehow, coheres, as precariously as the world itself.
