Designed specifically for the Grand Plateau de Césure, site of the former university library of Paris-3, the exhibition Solidité lumière (Solidity Light) offers an open landscape bringing together recent works and new productions by Yto Barrada. Among other things, it is a question of revisiting modernism, the art of rafts and drifting, establishing rules or breaking free from them, testing the resistance of colours (their Solidité lumière) and studying the metamorphoses of flowers.
In the centre of the space, to be explored like a playground, a suggestive set of sculptural works – the cast of a dinosaur skeleton discovered in Morocco, a raft bed from Tangier, a pink screen with bayadere stripes, shellfish traps whose assembly is inspired by the artist's stay on Tangier Island (Virginia, United States) and carpets that have become emotional diagrams – explores and stages the notions of creation, of transmission and our multiple relationships to time.
Nearby, the film A Day Is A Day (2022) sheds light on the meaning of the exhibition's title. It "documents" the highly technical and slightly surreal activities of two companies, located in Miami and Phoenix, specializing in measuring the resistance of colors and textiles to sunlight and climate. On the glass roof of the space, a related gesture is made with white from Meudon, natural and tinted. Colour and light as instruments for measuring time. From the After Stella series initiated in 2018, made in particular from dyes developed at The Mothership (Tangier), a set of textile works looks back at the history of modernism by combining patterns inspired by the geometric paintings made by the American artist Frank Stella (*1936) in the 1960s – some of whose titles bear the names of Moroccan cities –, with a production process resulting from know-how and techniques (sewing, dyeing) that had long been marginalized and excluded from the modernist canon. Colour and pigment as a tool for rewriting history.
Finally, a final set brings together photographs, collages, sculptures and posters to propose new formal, chromatic, educational and linguistic grammars. Samples and primers, word and material games, sketches and Fröbel-style exercises, repertoires and puzzle pieces underline Yto Barrada's interest in material culture, taxonomy, collective production and learning processes as well as pedagogy through experimentation.
crab traps, paint, paper, 37 traps, 61 × 61 × 50 cm, each
antique bed, barrels, and various materials, variable dimensions
cotton, dyes from plant, insect and mineral extracts, 195.6 × 91.4 cm, each
plaster, iron wire, 184.9 × 114.9 × 27.9 cm
cotton canvas, dyes from plant, insect and mineral extracts, 103.5 × 103.5 cm, each
Photo: Festival d’Automne à Paris / Aurélien Mole