ABIDJAN.- Un est multiple (One is many), such is the aphorism chosen by Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux as the title of his first solo exhibition. Two a priori antinomic terms that nevertheless perfectly describe the artist’s complex vision and his conception of identity in history. Fragments of places, faces, memories, like the trace of a memorable and sensitive landscape. Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux’s paintings are like the voices of an ancestral choir telling us about the colours of yesteryear and the dreams of tomorrow. The artist invites us to share moments lived or told, introduces us to members of his family, takes us into his universe made of childhood, adolescence and family stories, on the border between reality and dream. Here his sister, there his mother or his aunt, all the painted characters compose the testimony of the personal history of the artist, on the background of a larger history, that of the West Indies and more particularly of Guadeloupe, the artist’s native land.
Thus, in the work, a journey through time and space begins. Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux invites us to connect to a matricial ancestrality, linked to past rites, sometimes secret but constantly updated by a quest for contemporary meaning. Beyond the physical, beyond the tangible, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux’s painting is that of a wide-open, shared thought, ranging from Caribbean to African spiritualities. The composition of the canvases bears witness to this, notably through the symbolic presence of sacred animals such as the Ibis or the baboon, representing knowledge; that of the Vesica Piscis too, a principle symbolising the reunion of the material and immaterial world in the form of two circles that determine the dynamics of each of the canvases.
The artist reminds us that there is no identity that is not a mosaic, an archipelago, fragile and creative at the same time. In the technique itself, the apparent fixity of the line reveals a shiver and brings to life the fertile perspectives of the unattainable figuration. Influenced by the practice of collage, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux deliberately leaves the trace of his artistic process, painting in the process of being made, as a clue that everything is and always happens.
Black also carries a symbolic weight. Beyond a skin colour, in different Afro-Caribbean and Indian spiritualities it symbolises a divine colour, the symbol of the kiss of the sun, charcoal black. A primordial and cosmic colour, a place of creation and destruction, black is the essential component of the artist’s drawings, whose format is reminiscent of passport photographs. In order to reveal a form, the black of the marker is in some places cancelled out by white pastel, as in negative, the shadow preceding the light here. In his most recent canvases, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux works with black by superimposing thicker and finer textures, giving way to asperities that echo the complexity and plurality of the identity of the people represented.
Much like the mangrove, a tropical ecosystem at the crossroads of forest and swamp, where all the trees intertwine and mix their roots at the bottom of the water, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux’s plastic gesture extends over the territories of imagination and history. He reappropriates the places and spaces crossed through a gallery of portraits, fragments mixed with an intimate narrative and the larger story of a unique territory, that of the West Indies.
Born in 1995 in the West Indies on the island of Guadeloupe, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux now lives and works in Paris. At the age of 8, Elladj left his native island for Metropolitan France with his family. It is a total change, even a physical, mental and cultural revolution. Through his works, the artist explores an open and vibrant approach to the relationship between peoples and imaginations. His work is a form of initiatory journey, a reappropriation of an ancestral self which passes through a confrontation with its own darkness, before awakening to its own light. A passage from ignorance to self-knowledge that requires a «killing» of illusions.
