Yolande Labaki’s “Vagabond Memory”

Yolande Labaki approaches each day with a precise life discipline, centered around her artistic creation. “I paint all day,” she explains. I get up, go into my studio and stay there until nightfall. » In her studio, for some time now, she has been constantly questioning memory and its twists and turns. She has always been fascinated by this strange mechanism which never ceases to escape us, which leads us from one box to another, from one memory to another, uncertain, confused and fleeting. “Memory,” she says, “is sometimes present, sometimes rejected. We want to remember, sometimes we embellish it, and often the memory takes vague, wandering paths. »

Yolande Labaki has produced a series of paintings on memory, the result of her fascination with the way memories collide in chains. Courtesy of the artist

The result of this pictorial meditation is around fifty paintings, produced in a year of hard work, which attempt to capture the fluidity of memory and succeed in doing so with grace. Immersed every day in her natural pigments, Yolande Labaki reveals on canvas her vision of the mechanisms of memory, broken down into small geometric shapes, joyful and precious fragments delicately encrusted with gold leaf and glitter. Between escape and confinement, they slip through earthen masses or accumulate behind bars. Abstract, these works illustrate the invisible movement of memories, an enigma that the artist attempts to decipher through colors that are sometimes deep, sometimes vibrant, dictated by intuition and the moment.

It is a long-term work which marks her return to painting after a break of seven to eight years, during which she had abandoned the brush to explore other media, such as digital art, proof of her lively presence in the contemporary world. But a series of coincidences rekindled in her the desire to paint. “Collectors started asking me for paintings. It was this movement that started it all. I wanted to pick up my brushes again. »

This return took the form of this series on memory, the fruit of his fascination with the way in which memories collide in chains. For Yolande, “some bad memories can be buried, while others struggle to escape the darkness that encloses them.” “Sequins and gold leaf are these little things that I make shine, as if memories were trying to escape from a shackles or a prison,” she says. Its lines and shapes, often powerful, drawn with large gestures, evoke this obstacle that memory tries to overcome.

These sumptuous works, with the purest pigments, speak of captivity and freedom. They are a tribute to time, to the memories that spring up frozen in gold, before being released in a breath of escape.

Since her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1974, where surrealism guided her approach, Yolande Labaki has never stopped questioning the unconscious and the mysteries of the mind, but also the facts of society, between stylization and abstraction, exploring the most varied media, including silkscreen and lithography. Through “Mémoire vagabonde”, she continues this inner journey, ever more fascinated by these invisible enigmas which, from box to box, draw the contours of our personal and collective memory.

Yolande Labaki, “Vagabonde memory”, Cheriff Tabet gallery, from December 10 to 31, 2024.