Drawing in capital letters
Drawing Now is thinking big for its 17th edition.
This is the punchline of this Contemporary Drawing Fair which welcomes around 20,000 visitors each year.
Thinking big means breaking out of compartmentalization.
“We have often described shows like ours as niche.
On the contrary, I think that drawing is a major practice in the same way as painting and sculpture, explains Carine Tissot, director of the Drawing Society.
This practice had been relegated in the 1980s. We then favored performance, the concept... Today, a whole generation of artists, in the biggest schools, is training in drawing and screen printing.
Another strong signal: artists shortlisted for the Marcel-Duchamp prize have already been winners of the Drawing Now prize.”
For the third year, a bridge is made between the Salon du Dessin du Palais Brongniart and Drawing Now Art Fair, offering visitors a combined ticket, helping to make Paris the capital of drawing.
Thinking big also means freeing yourself from space, opening up to large formats, offering a panorama of drawing that ranges from watercolor to charcoal through collage.
Seventy-three galleries from fifteen countries were selected by the committee, which nominated five women artists for the 13th Drawing Now prize: Caroline Corbasson, Stéphanie Mansy, Catherine Meurisse, Marine Pagès, Tatiana Wolska.
The winner will be chosen on March 20.
LC
Drawing Now Art Fair
, from March 21 to 24, at Carreau du Temple, Paris.
drawingnoartfair.com
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Words to say it
Your brother
, by Minh Tran Huy, Éditions NiL.
Press.
Where does this very special and luminous atmosphere come from?
Due, undoubtedly, to the fact that this book is a letter from Minh Tran Huy (faithful collaborator of
Madame Figaro
) to her 2 and a half year old son (who will read it later), with all that that supposes of sincerity and emotion.
Little Serge has a 10-year-old older brother, Paul, who suffers from severe autism: he has no, or very little, interaction with others, he will never speak, he cannot be left unsupervised, he is often moved by great agitation.
So Serge and Paul's mother tries to tell the story of the constant battle she is waging with her husband, and which has brought them to the edge of the abyss.
But they held on, and a second child arrived, to whom she wants to tell the unparalleled joy he brings them, to whom she also tells that he is not there to replace, repair, compensate... The author looks back on the exile of her Vietnamese parents, whose families were severely affected during the war, and who became respected scientists in France.
How it took Paul's disability to finally question the parental injunction to academic success which imprisoned her throughout her childhood, and to understand how French meritocracy ultimately generates far too many decision-makers cut off from the reality, devoid of empathy and taste for the common good.
And unfortunately we must reiterate how far France is behind in the treatment of autism, and the unacceptable abandonment it leaves families with.
Exhaustion and despair, but also the magic of childhood, all of this is told in lively and poetic writing that sublimates a hellish daily life to unearth its beauty.
Parent or not, absolutely read this magnificent letter.
I.P
Your brother
, by Minh Tran Huy, Éditions NiL, 176 p., €17.
A mind-blowing adventure
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
, by Shehan Karunatilaka, Éditions Calmann-Lévy.
Press.
“You wake up with the answer to the question everyone is asking.”
It is with this intriguing sentence to say the least that the third novel by Shehan Karunatilaka, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 2022, begins. We follow the tribulations of Maali Almeida for a week, even though he has just died – and discover , therefore, that there is indeed life after life... We are in 1990, Sri Lanka is in flames and blood, and our hero, a war photographer by profession, has a week to find his or his killers and put his roommates – his lover, DD, and his best friend, Jaki – on the trail of a box of clichés that he hopes could end the conflict.
While taking your bearings in a beyond populated by ghosts and ghouls, specters and demons, where we read your story by examining your ears, where some enjoin you to "reach the Light" when others try to distract you by promising you the power to "whisper to the living", he launches into an investigation with twists and turns which depicts with biting acuity and desperate irony the personal, ethnic and political conflicts of which Sri Lanka is woven.
Who are the monsters, who are the victims, where does evil come from, and is good even a possibility?
Between thriller, fantastic novel and tale nourished by a truly mind-blowing folklore,
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
is by turns funny, dramatic and philosophical to take us on a journey with a sense of rhythm and an incredible force of evocation between the living and the dead , justice and vengeance, horrors and beauties of a nation and a man torn apart.
MTH
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
, by Shehan Karunatilaka, Éditions Calmann-Lévy, 450 p., €23.90.
Translated by Xavier Gros.