Biraaj Dodiya and Cezary Poniatowski at Galerie Derouillon

Artists: Biraaj Dodiya and Cezary Poniatowski

Exhibition title: News from home

Venue: Galerie Derouillon, Paris, France

Date: September 3 – October 5, 2024

Photography: ©Grégory Copitet / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Galerie Derouillon, Paris

Galerie Derouillon is delighted to present Biraaj Dodiya’s work in dialogue with Cezary Poniatowski for the first time in France. The exhibition, entitled “News from home” after Chantal Akerman’s film, brings together a range of new works by both artists. Both artists share a deep interest in the relationship between body and landscape, and in the way we construct our environment with our emotions, experiences and traumas. What makes a space familiar? What traces – visible and invisible – do we leave in the spaces we pass through?

Biraaj Dodiya’s paintings – canvases and installations – confront us with landscapes conceived as ruins in the making, introspective motifs of time and politics. Dodiya’s practice functions as a form of excavation: of the materials and layers of paint she adds and hollows out, of our belonging to a space, of the scars and relationships present in our everyday architectures, always playing on the point of tension of a moment that tends towards collapse. While the large canvases envelop us in their density, the small ones are for the artist “torso paintings” that confront us more intimately. Conceived in conversation with the canvases, the “plank” compositions extend the tectonic movements of Dodiya’s emotional landscapes into three-dimensional space. These diverted pieces of architecture recall the intrinsic relationship between a priori inert buildings and the human body, its verticality and fragility. The sculptural board-work functions as a bridge between the viewer and his or her environment, sometimes even as a silhouette along a wall.

In his own way, Cezary Poniatowski explores deeply political relationships to our environments, the ridgelines between absence and presence, and our ways of constructing domestic and intimate spaces. Poniatowski’s sculptures often take up everyday materials used in Poland before the fall of the Eastern bloc – carpets, polystyrene insulation board, imitation leather – charged with memories for the man who grew up there in the 1990s. The hieroglyphic compositions of his bas-reliefs are like skins that could convey something of the subconscious of the domestic spaces from which they have been peeled off. What might these walls have seen or heard? Cezary Poniatowski inverts the viewer’s point of view and plunges us into a Kafkaesque turmoil, a form of fantastic anxiety in which we are spied upon by the things and walls that surround us. For both artists, the body is always suggested by the traces it leaves on objects and the places it passes through. They place great importance on our experience of the new environment created by the encounter of their works in the gallery space. It’s up to us to navigate this magmatic moment when we feel a form of collapse coming on, to compose with our personal and collective histories in order to create breakthroughs and build ourselves a new home coiled in the ruins.

-Marion Coindeau