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BISAN HUSSAM ABU-EISHEH
Bayt Byoot “Playing House”, 2008-2011.
Photography : Nathalie Barki.
Collection Teixeira de Freitas, Lisbonne.
GILLES AILLAUD
Gilles Aillaud (1928-2005) is presented at the Ateliers de
Rennes in the company of artists of distinctly different
backgrounds. Aillaud is all too often associated with the
Narrative Figuration and New Figuration movements of the
1960s and 1970s in France. Although he is very well known
he deserves to be rediscovered. The zoo, an obsessive
theme, is at once a stage and a prison, which opens,
however, onto another place – that place from which the
animals have been cut off but which they carry within them.
The paintings are neither romantic nor sentimental, nor do
they reference the sublime; they are precisely enunciated
statements of dumb, living presences. In the animal
or landscape scenes, as in the drawings, the painting
becomes a living idea again that concentrates a series
of splits: between surface and depth, animal and man,
inside and outside. These arid and contradictory expanses,
the animals, the constricted spaces, are explorations
of registers of existence that put painting to the test of
reality in an introspective kind of art. Aillaud, as an heir of
modernity, closely examines questions of painting, surface,
materials, colour, figure and representation, yet does so
without abandoning reality. He pays close attention to ways
of inhabiting and occupying space. His paintings depict
worlds imprisoned by the human world but nonetheless
worlds with their own independent existence.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1928 in Paris (France), died in 2005.
Grille n°2, 1964. Collection Frac Bretagne.
Photography : Guy Jaumotte. © Adagp, Paris 2012.
Les Prairies's artists
Bisan Hussam Abu-Eisheh's work asserts itself by its size
and yet produces a paradoxical affect. His ten impeccable
white cabinets contain a heterogeneous collection of objects,
most of which are shattered, broken and damaged. But this
debris is topical. The objects were collected from the ruins of
houses destroyed by the Israeli government in a Palestinian
quarter of Jerusalem. Each one of them is arranged, labelled,
and precisely described on a piece of paper that states where
it came from, where it was picked up, the date of demolition
of the house and the number of people who lived in it. The
neutrality of this museographical device strips these objects
of all domestic reality. And yet they are no less attractive or
alive. Their origin is in real life and though they bear the
traces of destruction they also bear traces of existence. Ones
eyes are touching upon individual lives. Playing House – Bayt
Byoot achieves a documentary effect while at the same time
standing back from daily dramas that are abundantly reported
at international level. The short accompanying video echoes
this explosive political reality and also recalls the media
dimension. It was found on You Tube and is a loop of the
destruction of a Palestinian building in the Beit Hanina district.
The objects, having lost all ability to represent anything, seem
to have been brought in as a counterpoint to the continuous
film. They provide access to what current affairs reporting has
removed.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1985 in Jérusalem (Palestine), where he lives and works.
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