The “Songes” exhibition brings together Eve Malherbe and Degann, artists who take us into the world of dreams through works in which drapes, their infinite folds and creases, crystallise the whole of their research.
For Eve Malherbe (b. 1987), the painted drapes become the territories of dreams, folds of matter and soul where bodies disappear or signal their presence through minute details. This ambivalence, expressed in a pictorial style that is sometimes sober, sometimes silky, is the artist's claim to fame: ‘Cloth has a suppleness (and so does paint) that allows us to move from one state to another, to make connections, to combine the visible and the invisible, desire and taboo’. During her residency at Casa Velázquez (2022), Eve Malherbe also created portraits of sleepers using dust, an evanescent material that allows her to explore themes linked to the passage of time, such as sleep, adolescence and desire.
Degann (b. 1989)'s study of drapery focuses on a recurring motif: unmade beds. The large white or striped sheets, worked exclusively in Indian ink and in a hyper-realist vein, are an overture to the inner world of dreams and the unconscious: ‘It bears the traces of rest, dreams, intimacy or eroticism, but what attracts me above all is what remains afterwards: an invisible imprint, a silent tension’ declares the artist. Here again, ambivalence reigns:between dream and matter, absence and persistence.