ILLIMITES: SAHAR SAADAOUI
PAST exhibition
Overview
For the second time, Sahar Sadaoui responds to an invitation from the gallery, after her notable participation in Young Belgium - "Ineffable" - Opus1 - that gathered young artists born or working in Belgium, an exhibition held at the end of 2020 - early 2021, in the midst of the pandemic. Their production was related to the inexpressible, ineffable reality of emotion that imposes silence, not because there is nothing to say but because the immensity of what could be said seems unfathomable.
With that second exhibition, entitled "Unlimited", Sahar Saâdaoui expands our immersion into her universe made of silence, refinement and transparency, where things are blooming, skimmed, evanescent, diaphanous, through the production of already famous works like her coded alphabets, rouelles or framed patchworks but also brand new pieces of art, checkerboards and grids, all created with silk pongee - the fabric that is the foundation of her language - like as many flower petals whose purity and fratness summon parallel and encrypted universes.
For under the apparent sweetness and gracefulness of her artistic proposa, another world is revealed through the veil of the textile itself: the objective and well-structured actuality of the code, that very personal language of hers she has been using, since her very beginnings, to encode reality. The same reality that surrounds us, which, Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception teaches us, can be both transcendental and subjective, branded as it is with the seals of complexity, random and uncontrolled. In the real world, everything is emergence, coincidence, surprise, everything evades rules and consistency. It is the notorious pre- Socratic "Panta Rei": "everything flows and transience is the world's only constant". From this inconsistency, a sense of disorganized chaos might emerge, which artists will try to bring some order to.
Through her coding work, following the Creator Word principle, the Alpha and Omega, Sahar takes to codifying the Latin alphabet's 26 letters, hence poetically embracing the entire world as the Word creates the Thing. If the Word is coded, the Thing is the entire reality will be submitted to the code, allowing the artist to say the Everything like a delicate scribe of all spoken languages when facing the unspeakable.
Her grids and checkerboards evoke the concept of gaming, which is very present in the encryption work, as when a child tries to send messages through coded words deciphered through a grid. Isnt a checkerboard the epitome of a games symbolic space? In circles that aggregate different shapes and detailed forms, the artist reveals a variety of patters, redesigns figures to uncover the primal order, exactly like when we put a disordered domino game back in place.
All those scraps of fabric falling on the floor, likes matrices, having been cut and separated from positive letters, thereby extracted from the plane medium, are as many winks, drawings that also show how the artist pays attention to the concepts of enjoyment and fantasy which underlie her creation, like a child exploring possibilities, a living incarnation of a young universe in itself, the - refore necessarily .. unlimited
