Hans Theys

 

 

 

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Hans Theys

 

 

Mire and Myrrh

Some words on Alecia Pradolini’s work

 

 

Over the past ten years, the Dakar-based artist Alecia Pradolini (b. 1988) has been building a home of baked clay, colour, rhythms, murals, films, photos, children’s shouts, totems, amulets and other enchanting affairs that are vaguely shown in this booklet.

Fifteen years ago, I knew her as a student in Antwerp, Belgium. She was one of the two or three most driven and talented students I ever met. The first thing she showed me, was a sketchbook filled with nocturnal photographs that were stained with paint. The photographs were very peculiar, in a way I couldn’t grasp. ‘How do you come to these pictures?’ I asked. And she told me that she roamed the streets at night and that when she saw something that didn’t mean anything to her, something that seemed totally void of meaning, she took a picture. The stains, she explained, came from her fingers, that seemed to be dirty all the time. Because she painted. In those days, I have never seen a painting of hers. The only objects she showed, were amulets made with pieces of wood, wire and rusted nails. When I encouraged her to enlarge the magnificent stained photographs, she only did it once, using the resulting posters to cover up the floor of an exhibition space so the visitors couldn’t but stain them by walking over them. 

During her last year, however, all amulets and photographs disappeared. Pradolini withdrew in an abandoned space and started painting giant murals. Ten months in a row, without stopping, she painted thousands of murals on the same wall, documenting this Herculean endeavour on sped up videos, which she showed us at the end of the year. Her face, hands and body were swollen by the products she had used: paint, polyester, solvents, cleaning products. I think she barely survived.

Today this extraordinary woman is living in Dakar with her husband and two children. For years she has made sculptural works to integrate in her home, but she has also continued to create autonomous sculptures, to paint murals (now with her children), to take photographs and to make videos. Life and work are one. They have not merged, they have never been apart. They are felt as one, experienced as one, shaped as one. Reading this last sentence, I realise that many people will write this about an artist, but it is rarely true. I know, I have met hundreds of artists personally. Pradolini is an exception, the heroin of a courageous quest, a shaman-sorcerer, a Jedi knight. And you wouldn’t know if you met her, because she has no ego, she doesn’t represent herself, she seems to be transparent. I really like her. I respect her. And I love her work.

Before finishing, I would like to say something about the photographs. God knows I love the sculptures, but looking at the photographs today, remembering what Pradolini said about them fifteen years ago, I cannot help but notice that today they no longer seem to register ‘void moments’, but more precisely things unnoticed, objects with an extreme vulnerability, hovering on the verge of existence. Smudged with beautiful earth colours, they lose their potential postcolonial connotations, and become like flowers. In one of his letters to Louise Colet Flaubert wrote that artists tend to distinguish mire and myrrh, whereas in reality, he said, the myrrh has to be extracted from the mire. Valorising photographs (and the nameless world they depict) by smudging them! Amazing.

 

 

Montagne de Miel, 3 September 2024