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I HAVE A DREAM

I HAVE A DREAM

"I HAVE A DREAM" at the Musk and Amber Gallery

 

by Aziza Guermazy

 

Exhibition Date: May 05,  2023

 

It is with this exalted lyricism that painter Aziza Guermazi confides in us and invites us, hand on heart, into the lair of her secret garden where dreams reign supreme and carpet the infinite depths of her being...

 

With humanity and poetry, through her fantasy characters and richly colourful modulations, she cultivates the seeds of a common well-being in full bloom: justice, equity, peace, ecology, love, compassion, solidarity, tolerance, freedom... and all these virtues, once endangered or even silenced, are now moving towards the shores of lucid imagery and exposure.

 

The result is a buried garden in full bloom, a life and canvases to be desired by those who wish to see and be moved by them, between which plenitudes and bridges are mirrored, as the fabric of the dream awakens, where every detail conceals its share of wonder.

 

Silence, it's growing! It's dreaming and constellating!

 

"(...) Philosophy often forgets that before thought there is dream, that before clear and stable ideas there are images that shine and pass. Taken as a whole, Man is a being who not only thinks, but first imagines. A being who, when awake, is assailed by a world of precise images, and who, when asleep, dreams in a half-light where unfinished forms move, forms that move without laws, forms that deform endlessly".

- Extract from the lecture "Le dormeur éveillé" ("The waking sleeper") by the philosopher and dreamer of words Gaston Bachelard, broadcast on Paris Inter on 19 January 1954.

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She dreams lucidly and brazenly!

 

Through her dreamlike visions, she pours out the rosary of her own intimacy into our collective and shared memory. She paints and speaks at the same time, she depicts and denounces the realities of misfortune and misfortune that touch both the body and the heart....

 

And if, in her image and in unison, we bend our backs and pretend to dream in the face of drowsy consciences and drowsy convictions, would we dream our own dreams when so many others are deprived of dreaming theirs?

Will we be able to tune our fiddles and our visions around an ephemeral that thrives, this sweet and salutary living-together?

 

Aziza's art conveys a free, liberated and committed message that has manifesto value: "I HAVE A DREAM".

She likes to join with the humanists who stirred up dreams and ideals: Luther King, Gandhi, Mandela, Bourguiba and Halimi to name but a few... to federate others still...

 

She keeps her dreams, they are watching us... A dialectic is established, a vis-à-vis that relates as much as it distances.

A range of free interpretations and suppositions are interposed, where form and substance are grasped and relinquished, the impetus of a flight forwards or backwards, between memories of lost time and prolongations of distraught sensations.

 

Madeleines or prophecies, they're all legitimate and just waiting to be put into images, into stories, into life... in colour or sparingly in black and white. Her dreamlike graphics slip, in fact, from their flatness to embrace the spatiality of the temple of memory and dream.

She dreams and renews herself. She marvels, spurred on by a cursive and naïve graphic style in which the line, between full and loose, goes for a walk, a crossing:

Her simplified, abstract line weaves through the ramifications of her world (and soul) as an eternal child, pencilling in her spurts of memories and hopes to come...

 

The figures and other creatures that populate her inner chamber, all organic and deconstructed, nevertheless have a semblance of familiarity and proximity. They converse and reverberate through their personality traits.

 

Her tones and tonalities combine in harmony or conflict, but are nothing other than signs, meanings and essences of her life.

 

Aziza's dreams and paintings add up and covet each other like communicating vessels. With their imaginative permeability, these wells of inspiration inspire a contemplative, active and reactive projection of an image revealed as if awakened. Underlying all this enchanted, shimmering world lurks a system of references and ricochets, more like an 'echo-system' of unbound language, of deformed, shapeless, reinvested, dreamed forms... because, in the end, "You can only see with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye".

 

She dreams big, in the small embrace of a quotation, in capital letters, in colours that are frankly and fiercely radical, not just to court a kind of passionate ardour or to lay claim to certain native, solemn, symbolic ties. She, the wing, simply dreams of seeking freedom, up there in the starry wake, where everything emancipates itself from the weight of a somewhat bitter and etiolated reality, where everything frees itself from the gravity of the earth and of life.

Fluttering and resting its wings to take off again, it dreams down here, in the depths of itself, in the hollow of its heart, in the raw and vivid of its emotions.

 

In this interweaving of scales, Aziza oscillates, a bubble of air in a ball of flesh, between "dreams of exaltation and dreams of depth".

- (Gaston Bachelard, "L'air et les songes" - "Air and dreams" 1943)

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She dreams on the threshold of a half-open door, revealing what lies beneath the flutter of eyelids, in the underbelly of the visible or in the volatility of chimeras. A back door to worlds that are parallel but also possible and hoped for, with all the hostile detours and all the beautiful meadows and secret gardens too...

 

She dreams and narrates the imagined stories of these imagined landscapes. Not a syrupy, flat, flowery fairy-tale dream, but dreams combined, far from the first and reducible degree, with a thousand and one nuances, benevolent, threatening, strange, penetrating, persistent... Aziza ventures down these penetrable paths, reinventing the keys and the means of expression.

 

She gives herself body and soul, in the arms of Morpheus, and devotes herself, sometimes nocturnal and sometimes diurnal, conscious and unconscious at the same time, to her practice of balancing along a path that she draws and which, in the end, is destined for us.

 

"I HAVE A DREAM" is no more an invitation to explore her dreamlike landscape on the run than it is to look for any kind of fixed, sealed record of her state of mind.

 

It's an invitation to everyone to travel and reflect under the sign of a winged, nebulous word whose slow, fertile time should be appreciated...

 

"It is by travelling through the eyes of others that we discover the world" - (Saphia Wesphael). 

Reference work :

 

• Pablo Picasso, The Dream, 1932.

https://www.pablopicasso.net/the-dream/

 

• Joan Miró, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, 1977.

https://www.grandpalais.fr/en/node/50644

 

• Gaston Bachelard, "L'Eau et les Rêves: Essai sur l'imagination de la matière" - "Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter", 1942.

 

• Gaston Bachelard, "Le dormeur éveillé" - "The Walking Sleeper", lecture on 19 January 1954 on Paris Inter.

https://citationsdenoslectures.fandom.com/fr/wiki/Transcription_de_la_conférence_:_Le_dormeur_éveillé

 

• France Culture radio series hosted by Marie Richeux: "Les rêves" - "The Dreams" series;

  • Episode 2 "Rêver d'un monde meilleur, ou agir pour lui?" - "To dream of a better world, or to act for it?"
  • Episode 4 « L’art, est-ce un rêve éveillé ? » -

"Is art a daydream?"

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/serie-les-reves

 

• Saphia Wesphael, column "Droit de citer #1 : Rêves et politique" - "Right to quote #1: Dreams and politics";

"Visiteurs du soir" - "Evening visitors" programme on LN24.

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Aziza Guermazy

Aziza Guermazy was born in Tunisia in 1991. She is a painter with an atypical background and is based in Tunisia.
Passionate about architecture, she studied for two years at the Ecole Nationale d'Architecture Paris Malaquais, after which she obtained a master's degree in customer relationship management).
In 2018 she decided to devote herself full-time to her art, and since then she has taken part in several solo and group exhibitions (in Tunisia, Italy, Dubai, Jordan and Lebanon).


Through her paintings, Aziza introduces us to her own world where imagination knows no bounds.


It's a utopian world where her characters are generally free and happy, floating in a colourful cosmos. It's a world inspired by her childhood memories, dreams, landscapes, violence and the misery of the world, and behind her dreamlike paintings, striking colours, shapes and motifs lie many messages.
She creates a new vision of life, and paints an ideal society independent of the constraints of reality.


"It is through semi-human characters that she creates, she tells a story each time and this story can be interpreted in an infinite way. Her works are a subtle blend of colours and intelligible characters in a variety of geometric shapes, an ode to reflection. "
- Rami Abdou Diab, Arab news