arié mandelbaum & amina rezki
One place
two artists
three stories
The 73 of the Avenue Louis Lepoutre was used, for several months as my workshop and assembly room, before I had the idea of opening up the main room to other artists. Since 2009 as a matter of fact I am developing an artistic work in photography, installations and video.
Originally, art stories | gallery is therefore a place of creation. A place of creation that now opens up to the stories - big and small - that make artists, whose trajectory and encounters are at the heart of the project. And when these encounters have not yet taken place, it is we who provoke them! Because the encounter of two universes exacerbates this gift of art, which is as Proust once said "instead of seeing a single world, ours, we see it multiplied"1.
Amina Rezki and Arié Mandelbaum met a few years ago, but their works never had the opportunity to dialogue in the same space. What better symbol of what we want to achieve here? What better example, of these happy accidents of life, to inaugurate this gallery?
"art stories | gallery" does not start its adventure with a "stable" of selected artists on the "market" of art. In its genesis, the place itself is an artistic expression, a kind of performance in real time and on a human scale.
In 2009, when I enrolled at the Academy of Uccle, one of my intuitions got confirmed. Art is the only way out. The promise of a freer world. In this world, encounters with living artists - or dead - stimulate the reflection that sometimes leads to questioning. This was the case with Amina Rezki and Arié Mandelbaum.
Thus, I realized that very few artists of Moroccan immigration had emerged in Belgium. Amina Rezki was one of the few to have managed to get through the threads of social determinism. She is, in my opinion, a survivor of the artistic nothingness in which her family history - although fulfilling in many other aspects - had almost buried her.
Since childhood, Amina Rezki liked to draw. At the age of 18, braving her mother, she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. But another career path prevailled with no less than eight happy events. She is a devoted mother who doesn't spare strength or efforts. To the point that she has not enough energy left for her art, her passion. Nearly fifteen years later, it was an existential crisis that saved her and brought her back to her art. At the Academy of Uccle, she is noticed and encouraged by two of her teachers, themselves artists, Etyen Wéry and Arié Mandelbaum.
It is the latter who gives her access to a studio, "a room of one's own", as Virginia Woolf would say. A unique opportunity to catch up time, not lost, but who has almost erased her dreams of creation. What Claire Stoullig interprets as "self-violence"2. "No wonder," she continues, "that most of her paintings represent a search on figures, portraits often unidentified."
But these portraits or self-portraits, which escape a fixed representation, also evoke for me, a resistance/reminiscence of the prohibition of human representation, still present in the Muslim tradition. A transgression that gives way in the work of Amina Rezki to the reconquest, by successive layers, of the deliquescent image of the father. The latter, disappeared too soon, after having her thorn away, in the sixties, from her birthplace, Morocco. Even if it was to offer her a better future in Belgium.
On the other hand, Arié Mandelbaum, of Polish Jewish origin, shares this "experience of uprooting" that Serge Meurant has evoked in his text (see p. 13 of the catalogue). He has been following the artist since 19773.
An uprooting tainted with inhuman violence, the Shoa. A recurring theme in the work of Arié Mandelbaum. But his representation is possible only through a suggestive process. "Showing more would be indecent", he said. A paradoxical work. Hard in its theme (annihilation, the duty of memory ...) but with a diaphanous softness in its treatment.
The art cover of the catalogue, Arié Mandelbaum's interpretation of the "Origin of the World", and Amina Rezki's tied-handed man, are the beginning of this dialogue, a foretaste of meeting of these two generous artists during the inaugural exhibition of art stories | gallery.
Malika Es-Saïdi
Brussels, le 25 october 2017
