Lyfe — Yassine Yaze Mekhnache — Suzanne Tarasieve, Loft 19 — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 16 → May 7, 2011

Born in Lyon in 1979, Yaze has 15 years of painting and an impressive number of paintings behind him. After numerous exhibitions in Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Shanghai and Hong Kong ; his noted participation in several artist residencies (Algiers, Shanghai, Marrakech) and “Animal Dream” (Marrakech, October 2010), Yaze presents in this exhibition a new version of his work.

Faithful to his object of study, the faces, “Lyfe” embodies these portraits in a new form, more suggested than drawn.

A series of twelve embroideries mounted on canvas and worked on with inks, markers and pastels, “Lyfe” is a milestone in the work of Yaze. Following an approach inspired by the Keffiyeh pattern he experimented in 2007, this work on embroideries results from a willingness to include an ancient Arab tradition in his paintings and at the same time to operate a turning point in his pictorial technique.

Feminine gentleness, mastered time, subdued body materialized by embroideries with regular geometric patterns contrast with the violence of the pictorial accident that Yaze provokes with ink splatters, splashes, colour gushes. The dazzling gesture, the execution of dripped coloured spots contribute to a painting intimately connected to the emotions of the artist.

A large-scale exhibition, the twelve canvases of 190 × 190 cm can be understood as four gigantic triptychs made from silver, golden, black or red yarn. Drawn quickly with sprayed paint, the patterns used by “his” Moroccan embroiderers are transposed using traditional geometric motifs according to the counted thread embroidery technique called Terz El Gherza.

The embroidered forms constitute a strong visual language, with a regular weft and, here and there, dotted lines, isolated stars, threads tangled up on the canvas, like a prerequisite that Yaze uses to apply inks and pure pigments. Capillarily disseminated, iridescent, the colors emit vibrations of a high sensitivity. Primarily organic, the forms that appear seem to have an independent life. A planisphere, animals, faces spring up from colour deltas, scratches, veins, drips that animate the canvas for an outpouring of emotions.

Like an injunction, “Lyfe”, or the expression of a lust for life, works like a talisman, making Yaze and his paintings a seething epiphany.