Galerie Cécile Fakhoury - Paris is pleased to present Mody : celui qui vient des deux mondes [Mody: the one who comes from both worlds], the second solo exhibition of the artist Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux. 

 

On large delicate papers, Elladj draws his motifs and his model, Mody, whose imaged name means in Wolof «the one who comes from both worlds» Assigned to duality, he is a romantic figure, the Man who has left himself in several territories and who, circulating between these spaces, makes himself their interstice. Mody, torn from his original place by the force of things and others, is the one who has left and who will find himself modified, marked, krazé (crushed in Guadeloupean Creole) by this tear. 

 

Deploying themselves in a tighter chromatic range, the works presented are a deepening of the research developed by the artist for his first monographic exhibition «Un est multiple» at the Galerie Cécile Fakhoury - Abidjan in 2020. Through the choice of the focal object lace, it is the reflection around the Guadeloupean heritage of the artist that continues to be spun. Of an old-fashioned beauty, lace works are omnipresent in West Indian homes. They are often made into table runners and centrepieces and adorn the various meetings, meals and family ceremonies. A precious heritage transmitted, continued and preserved from generation to generation, they are the fruit of such a long work that it is in reality purely meditative. The symbolism of this lace object becomes increasingly dense with its encounter with the African continent and the personal history of Mody who, in the same way, inherits images of his mothers adorned with Senegalese embroidery. 

 

Thus, the wrought textile becomes a remnant of personal and shared memories. It is at once a symbol of a matrix sheet - the envelope of procreative union, of baptism in water - and of a mortuary shroud. Despite these positive connotations of ritual and sacramental protection, one cannot help but wonder whether being at one with this cloth is really a consoling experience for the subject. Does the light lace suffocate him? Is it caught in the net? By what retiarius? According to the artist, «Mody, grappling with the plurality of his identity, oscillates between the desire and the rejection to drop the veil on the storm of his interiority. To drape is a dual action that in the same movement covers, conceals and reveals him, making him visible by embracing his shape.» 

 

Plastically, the weight and texture of the draperies are rendered by the generous addition of material and sand on several of the canvases. The framing, which suits the elongated forms of the paintings, produces the effect of trunk-works, baobab or mangrove roots. They structure the exhibition space like columns - so that this ascending scenography completes Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux’s creation of a new transformative space-time. 

- Louise Thurin