Diver’s Flight

Waking up from a deep pleasant dream

with raised arms like thirsty roots pointing to the sky

Jumping the highest

0, 3, 2, 1

To dive

underwater

Beneath the earth

until no abyss is yet drawn 

Sara Bichão, Lisbon, September 2024  

This new exhibition by Sara Bichão resonates with the artistic practice of an artist who evolves in a fruitful back-and-forth between solitary work and regular exchanges with fellow artists – which can lead to collaborative projects and co-creations from time to time. These oscillation movements that enrich Sara Bichão’s work and mark her journey have guided the construction of this exhibition, which is both monographic and collective, bringing together, alongside the artist, Armineh Negahdari, Diego Bianchi, Gyan Panchal, Julien Carreyn, and Miriam Cahn.

During our exchanges throughout the preparation of the exhibition, the figure of the diver from Paestum came to nourish our reflections until it imposed itself as the subject of the project. This nude character, painted on the internal wall of a slab covering a Greek tomb from the 5th century BCE, has jumped into the air and is diving towards the water. He is about to join the abyss and the darkness of death, while his image, through the painting, survives in the memory of the living.

The origin of the elements that compose a large part of the works in the exhibition is not far from the choice of this archaeological reference. Sara Bichão has taken them from a house inhabited by memories, and in her own way—like a graft—she prolongs the reminiscences of a home and its inhabitants into another, the one that her works themselves shelter.

If the figure of the diver has so profoundly affected Sara Bichão, it may also be because it aligns with her way of envisioning art. The artist, like the diver, strikes and penetrates the surface of the world, facing the danger of darkness and solitude, at risk of losing the foot or drowning.

Diving and creating require a certain letting go, a source of thrill and pleasure for those who practice them. But executing a dive or a work of art also requires technical mastery and a keen attention to the elements. One must be capable of resurfacing and returning to the shore, without being swept away by the current or submerged by the waves. For Sara Bichão, the artistic practice is resolutely on the side of the sensitive, and is inseparable from an attitude that engages the body and the spirit—on the threshold of void and vertigo, at the limit of losing bearings and meaning—but always as an act of resistance and survival. Like the diver, she intertwines flight with fall, pleasure with risk.

Sara Bichão and the artists gathered in this exhibition, share the commonality of diving their gaze below the surface, and through their gaze they make us perceive what is there and what we may not have known or wanted to see before. They reveal the blind spots of our vision, and beyond that, they offer us a different way of seeing. Their works illuminate us, disturb us, unsettle us. In the same movement they transform the object of the gaze, the world, the subject that observes. Ourselves.

The works of Armineh Negahdari, Diego Bianchi, Gyan Panchal, Julien Carreyn, and Miriam Cahn unfold around two works by Sara Bichão intimately linked by light. 

On the ground, Pique takes on the appearance of a tomb made of earth bricks extracted from a geography  that is intimately linked to someone of  the artist’s family, who has now passed away. Sara Bichão has carefully covered each brick with sheets of aluminum, as if to better protect them and allow the sun by day or the moon by night to illuminate them with their beams. Above, Reflector casts its shadow. One thinks of Icarus, of whom Pascal Quignard wrote that “[his] fall took the imaginary relief of the diver’s tomb” (Sex and Fear, Gallimard, Paris, 1996).On the wall, the face of Miriam Cahn’s character fixes us. Her gaze is intense, as if arrested by what it sees. A transfer seems to occur as if this ghostly figure, with spectral colors and surrounded by a blue halo, is physically sharing her gaze with us, and we are experiencing it—perhaps what the title Gefühl (“sensation”) indicates.

An evanescence also emanates from the subjects photographed by Julien Carreyn. Often on the edge of visibility, his images remind us of those slightly blurry memories that come to mind and vanish immediately. The photographic image is fragile. It almost fears being seen. Light erases it a little more with time. Even without knowing the places or people photographed, the fragility of the object and this intimacy summoned by its pocket format make these photographs precious, like those of our loved ones that we sometimes carry with us. Under their appearance of failed or illegible photographs, the alchemy of the gaze—what the artist was able to see and communicate to our senses—gives them a new meaning

Fragility is also present in the drawings and sculptures of Armineh Negahdari, but unlike Julien Carreyn, the artist exhibits them without protective frames or glass, at the “peril” measured by the exposure and the viewers. She shows them to us naked, with their marks and tears. She denies them a casing that might betray the spontaneity of their expression, the frankness and immediacy of their strokes drawn without detours, direct and raw.

A certain rawness also transpires in the assemblages of Diego Bianchi, who tirelessly seeks to relate the body and objects, the living and the inert. In the Framing Time series, the artist dismembered seats and then joined their legs to form distorted frames onto which he grafted soft shapes or latex body parts—tongue, ear—as if he were distorting the boundary that separates body and object.

The relationship to the body also permeates Gyan Panchal’s assemblages. A sensuality emanates from these objects that he collects and arranges. The artist strives to strip them bare, revealing their properties, their transparency or opacity, their lightness or heaviness, the roughness or softness of their surface. He reveals more than he transforms. Like Sara Bichão, he cares for these refuse, damaged, stranded on the sidelines or shores. He assembles some with others, brings materials and stories together, and summons our senses, our gazes, and our imaginations so that his works reveal themselves to us, but partially, without fully exposing themselves, always retaining their share of mystery.

Noëlig Le Roux, Paris, October 2024

Please preview all artworks HERE.

Please download exhibition leaflet HERE.