Lamia El Guermai’s Exposition

Balance and harmony

In a world where violence is becoming increasingly widespread, the art of cultivating balance within ourselves and in our relationships with others is becoming a necessity if we are to uphold the values of respect, tolerance and recognition, and align our behaviors with them, without compromise or deviation: solidarity, closeness, sharing, love and conviviality are unquestionably the most beautiful manifestations of balance and harmony there are to be able to live and flourish.
At first glance, the notion of balance might conjure up images of the circus, of tightrope walkers and acrobats, yet the question of proportions is designed to rediscover and magnify balance. It’s in contrasts and in the interplay of symmetry and asymmetry that my works rhythmically flatter harmonious balance and set our senses abuzz.

For me, art helps us go beyond the utilitarian reading of things to access their own truth. With my representations, I try to establish an alchemy of sensations in which color, especially fluorescent color, plays an essential role, acting like an energetic gang bang. I also try to free color from its representational function and its attachment to the everyday. In this way, it acts as an abstraction operator, as my paintings are read as underlying, changing forces, despite their fixed form. That’s why I give them a dreamlike, sometimes supernatural dimension. My choice of portraiture brings memories back to life, or creates suspended atmospheres by focusing on the postures and attitudes of bodies. In short, I unfold my unfettered universe, a bittersweet domestic universe based on a dualistic logic: good # evil; beautiful # ugly; young # old; man # woman; shadow # light; light # dark.

And if reality is a chaotic dream, only art allows us to look at the balance and harmony of the world: balance concerns quantity; gravity, power relations, while harmony implies quality and the convergence of these qualities towards a common end. Being in the Heideggerian sense means stability, but also inner fulfillment and permanence. My painting seems to be in search of this double meaning, by being myself outside the world, in a perpetual transgression of its limits. It’s a gap between perspectives that allows me to play with the idea of representation and the doubling of presence. Are we in a dream where the world is seen in reverse? Or are we witnessing a vision from within, a vision of what lurks inside the thing represented in a delicate, committed work?

In the end, my art is simply a way of capturing a lived experience in the service of a magical-poetic realism. I restore the pulp of life in symbolic situations.