Alma Feldhandler at Galerie Derouillon

The white butterfly referred to in the title of Alma Feldhandler’s exhibition would be a character outside the frame, invisible but omnipresent. A daily companion that has the bad habit of attacking only precious materials, without touching their weave; objects eaten by moths still stand despite the holes. Moths would be mythical creatures of the rural and peasant life of the shtetls whose atmosphere Alma Feldhandler’s paintings try to capture. Nourished by archival images and texts, the scenes depicted also share a familiarity with the writings of Max Blecher (from whom several titles are borrowed), Bruno Schulz or Joseph Roth, who are sensitive to daily life in the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe. The very thin layers of oil stretched on the canvas make strange figures appear in a colored mist, with blurred outlines like a faded memory. Behind the harshness and frugality, the sense of reality gradually disintegrates, as if the men and their surroundings had become clumped together. Alma Feldhandler shares with these «sanatorium writers» a fascination for cursed places and figures, as harsh as they are intense. She thus likes to see her paintings as vestiges. Discarded images whose depth of color digs into bottomless compositions, and sucks us in.

-Marion Coindeau