Press & texts

“Landscapes with absent figures”: these are the words of Jaccottet that resonate when one looks at a painting by Komili, and finds oneself absorbed by the silent music of these places, as familiar as they are strange, which stand there. These urban landscapes on the edge of the mineral and the vegetal, almost always devoid of any human trace, are neither “still lifes”, nor “still alive”, nor even between the two – they would then be dying. On the contrary, they vibrate with hidden presences, momentary absences, spaces which emerge from torpor, finally freed from all buzzing occupation, and which play with the secrets that the shadows outline in the recesses of the colors. Landscapes with absent figures, but from which nothing is missing because they are both full and empty: full of their bursts of light, of their forms, of their materials and of their own structures, empty of what is perhaps only hidden at the corner of their partly unveiled horizons and perspectives. Komili’s paintings are windows opening onto places that seem caught off guard, caught by surprise in a stolen snapshot, and which reveal as much as they still conceal.

We first discover places that unfold at the junction of a unique space, time and point of view. Each glance cast at the surfaces and corners of the walls, openings, planes embraces a space that the light has carved out in a precise and fleeting moment, and that the artist herself has captured from a place and an angle. of specific view. But if these places are caught by the painter’s brush like the photographer takes a snapshot, here and now, then what would we see from another angle, another space, another time? Yet Komili does not show a here and now contingent, purely accidental, which would only be an image of the more or less distracted glance of the passer-by: it makes us dive into places that are revealed, for beyond any precise anchorage, in their timeless and universal aspect, because they go beyond their simple contours. Such a tree, such a facade, such a construction site, are perhaps a tree, a facade, a construction site that we could meet again in the depth of reality, at the bend of a road and at random glance . In this these places are deeply familiar, like all these things that we see without looking, that we occupy or cross without really stopping there. But brought to our attention by the painter, they become strange, fantastic, with a more subdued and fuller presence than one might have thought, far beyond what each of our irreducibly rooted points of view can seize it.

These places are in-between, at the intersection or rather at the interstice of nature and artefact, of the completed and the abandoned, of the closed and the open: you never really know which, constructions or vegetation, envelops or conquers the other, nor whether one should expect someone or something there, nor where the limits of inside and outside are played out. Lines, shapes and perspectives interlock and bounce over the contrasts and depths of colors, worked with tact and rigor by the artist. The density of the shadows cuts out the mineral contours of vibrant ochres, reds, yellows, pinks and whites, which in turn join the luminous and organic browns, greens and blues of a nature that sometimes arises in the foreground, sometimes extended and sneaked behind the edges of the walls. To the geometries of

lines are added the movements and the notes of the colors: not only those which one sees on the surface, but those which move under the figure of the things and diffuse, by their silent harmonies, environments calling again to be inhabited and lived. Because in Komili’s paintings, as with her, it is never a question of playing half-measures or half-words. To paint, to see, to think, is like laughing, loving or being indignant: only the whole can be worth anything and make us reach the bottom of things.

This requirement governs his work as a painter, rigorous, absolute, technical, which also becomes that of the viewer. The artist draws us into his paintings by refusing all narrative facilities and comfortable codes: it is a question of trying to see, to feel, to find this hidden something that the place carries within it. And for that we have to dive under the skimming thread of appearances: we enter the painting through an unexpected angle of view, which enjoins us to follow the intersections of contours and colors, hollows and solids of the material, cutouts and rays of light. Nowhere can the gaze stop definitively: it first embraces a whole, then finds itself immediately caught up in a line, a relief, a reflection on which it slides to bounce off the end of an unexpected perspective, posed there in this balance and this grace of bones thrown by a formidable demiurge, and which then leads to a surreal element opening in turn another dimension of the landscape hitherto unsuspected. In this punctuated and wavering rhythm, the painting is recomposed again and again, with its shadows and its passages, its colors and its depths, its masses and its falsely motionless lines.

But if one penetrates far enough into these places with open sky and windows which fold, unfold and fit together in their own combination, one feels an intimate and restful presence emerging. The place comes to life and forms in these games of volumes, nuances and reflections that silently echo each other. What seemed desert, uninhabited, vacant, no longer has anything of a void. It is a hollow, which throbs with this presence that ruins and vestiges also have: that of possibilities, secrets, expectations, resonances of a past or perhaps of a present that has fallen silent. a moment to let something larger breathe. There is in Komili’s canvases a silence different from that of any painting: the silence of what has been abandoned, forgotten, returned to itself, and which alone can then rustle in peace with the rumor of these thousand little things. which vibrate unbeknownst to our gaze. Far from being a decor, the place takes shape: it becomes a character, a being in its own right, breathing its rhythm and its pneuma clean, embodied in all the large format of the paintings. This unoccupied place which is revealed on the canvas is presence in itself: it alone fills the space, it alone matters, because it alone endures under the flow of absent beings, things and figures. By being both finished and unfinished, open and closed, outside and inside, empty and full, the place carries what is, what is no longer, what could be again.

This is what is unique, also disturbing, in Komili’s work: she paints places that are at the same time non-places, space-times suspended between here and nowhere, elsewhere. and everywhere, now and always. The question is no longer where, or when, or even to where. Because over the passages and wanderings of the eye between the interstices, through the openings, in the new strangeness of these places relieved of the linearity of their functions, Komili brings out the diffuse impression of having reached another familiarity , more

profound, more tranquil, more universal too: that of duration itself. Crossing distances, volumes and colors the gaze finds, in the thickness and the concreteness of the concrete and the bark, the mute vibration of the permanence which hides under the indifferent use of things. This is what Komili brings out in his paintings: what is played out under the fleetingness of the individual gaze, below the semi-consciousness of being, beyond the here and now of our passages. His paintings are not anecdotes about these places which no one pays attention to; they reveal what we could rather be anecdotes in places that guard us and that extend further than ourselves. Points, lines, perspectives that move and wander for a moment in space, to leave the geometric trace of their trajectories.

“When I consider the short span of my life absorbed in the preceding and following eternity – memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis* – the small space that I fill and even that I see sunk into the infinite immensity of spaces that I ignore and that ignore me, I am frightened and surprised to see myself here rather than there, because it is not there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who put me there? By whose order and direction was this place and this time destined for me? »1. To this Pascalian anguish the painter, carrying the ancient wisdom of those who knew how to build as well as philosophize through the centuries, responds by showing, twice, this fundamental gesture by which we mark places and make the world: the creation that seeks order, measure and duration. Whether it is architecture or painting, built structure or cinematographic framing, pending construction or finished canvas, it is always in this same gesture that we find the vestiges of our finitude and our grandeur, the traces of our passages, the echo of our conscience and our will to last beyond ourselves. In the infinities of reality we build, we inhabit, we create, by depositing in the hollow of places and things the sum of our short durations. Komili’s paintings are thus so many windows themselves creative on what endures, on what makes fun of the abandonment of our eyes, on what is nevertheless revealed if the artist brings it back, imperiously, to the canvas.

This is where, in the work of the painter, all the work in the work is played out: it is a question of bringing out and showing this vital impetus which nestles in the hollows of human creations, which resists consumption and usury and thus achieves, as Arendt said, the immortality of the world. This is why the brush is always mastered, demanding, in nuances but also without compromise: it invokes these places to make us penetrate into their intimacy, to reveal the contours, the perspectives and the interwoven colors, and to finally make burst what is woven and resists under the silent and apparent immobility of objects. These forgotten, ignored, barely crossed places, which Komili brings back to life and to our attentive perception, are not things that wear out and die. They are one of those works which, like the paintings in which they find themselves caught in the abyss, escape time and bring us back to this universal desire, the one which is at the origin of everything that man digs, builds , cut, create, paint: last. In the canvas, the graphic and chromatic scansions of the shapes make the diffuse and tranquil presence of this eternity hidden within

1 Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, bundle “Misere”, ed. Lafuma, thought 68. * “the memory of a guest lodged for a day, and who passes by.”

the immanence, of this serene and peaceful permanence in which, at the end of the journey of the gaze, one can finally remain. Not simply to exist but to settle, rest and endure through the beings, the things and the places that we create, because in turn they will pursue, undo and start again with the eye, the hand and the mind this human home that we share. It is this dwelling that the painter makes present to us in the canvas, beyond our presences and our absences. It is in it alone that the short duration of our lives can cross the silence of infinite and eternal spaces, and be inscribed in these places that we inhabit, leave and bequeath to each other. Create to remain, a little more, a little longer; stop for a moment, and be able to contemplate the figures of our passages, between two spaces and two times suspended from what we let be.