NOSTALGIA AND THE WAR, Isabelle Manoukian

13.11 – 12.12.26

La La Lande Gallery is delighted to present NOSTALGIA AND THE WAR, a solo exhibition by Isabelle Manoukian, running from 13 November to 12 December at the gallery’s space at 56 rue Quincampoix, 75004 Paris.

Two scenes coexist in Isabelle Manoukian’s works.

The first is a central scene of nostalgia, shaped by happy, festive family memories, once captured in photographs in all their everyday reality, and now transformed through a style of painting inspired by Persian miniatures. Flat areas of colour lend these scenes a conceptual quality while bringing them back to life; embellishments further idealise them. The figures, all close to the artist, including her Lebanese father and Syrian mother, both of Armenian descent, were once rendered invisible, constrained by the enforced discretion that exile in France imposed upon them. Here, they are brought back into the light, enthroned beneath golden firmaments that illuminate them. Elegantly dressed in ornate costumes that evoke the splendour of Ottoman kaftans, they are elevated to stardom alongside Oum Kalthoum, Maria Callas and Henri Salvador, singing to them of love and hope. They are transported into lush panoramas, glorified recollections of the landscapes of Beirut and Aleppo, drawn from the artist’s childhood summers spent there in carefree innocence. These are so many lost Gardens of Eden, restored by the artist to her uprooted parents, made even more paradisiacal by dreamlike, luxuriant flora and fauna.

Yet ambivalence and melancholy already begin to fracture these dreamlike memories. In Les Déracinés, suspended between several countries, a root-like necrosis takes hold of one of the figures’ feet, betraying an absence of homeland. Their cultures of origin and adoption gradually dissolve, like the cedar of Lebanon, whose warm golden hues are half-cooled by a haze of mauve paint. In Le Narguilé, the shadow of a mashrabiya falls across half of the artist’s brother’s face, caught between his Lebanese birthplace and his French life. In Le Militant, her former partner is trapped within the gilded cage of his own certainties, unaware that he might escape this mental prison. And in Un été à Alep, a self-portrait of the artist in a black swimsuit, her posture melancholic and her surroundings comparatively sparse, bears witness to the deprivation of her maternal homeland, Syria, tempering the opulence of her father’s Lebanon.

The cracks in these scenes, sheltered by their placement within the paintings, are clues that offer glimpses of a second, external scene, exposed to danger. At the margins, an almost imperceptible scene emerges each time, rendered invisible by the black and white of a faint wash of Chinese ink: brandished weapons, ruins, women and children fleeing, skulls from the Armenian Genocide, whose echoes still reverberate today in other parts of the world. This is the scene of perpetual conflict – memories reawakened by the Thirty-Three-Day War between Israel and Lebanon – whose imagery is once again drawn from photographs, this time from the press. These clashes, which have continued to knock at the door of a reassuring cocoon from the artist’s childhood to the present day, give rise to a rift between two opposing emotions, an almost inconceivable dissonance: the innocence of childhood fractured by the perversity of war, caught between the bursts of celebration and the explosions of shells. Lost paradises bordered by violence, yet ultimately overwhelmed by nostalgia: the recollection of a mythologised happiness that gives birth to a soothing sense of hope.

Aurélien Simon