Maïmouna Guerresi.

Maïmouna Guerresi. Nûr/Light/ نور

In biblical times light was the representation of the divine: for the chosen people it is the Torah; in medieval Islamic thought it is associated with the soul. It is in the Far East that the concept of «yang» (light) took shape and spread as opposed to «yin» (darkness): a duality that shapes the universal dialectical and speculative exercise.

Light is the beginning of everything.

According to Maïmouna Guerresi the concept of light («nûr» in Arabic) is expressed through the white or red line that splits in half the face of the subjects of her photographic works. Monumental figures like Throne in Black or Fatuma and the other young black women, protagonists of Her Private Garden, Sound 6, Rābiʿa, Aisha’s Stories 2, Red Oracle who slowly lose their two-dimensional solemnity to become part of a potentially real landscape. For the artist, the everyday landscape is a land of experimentation by the Italian-Senegalese artist of an «aesthetic syncretism» in an intimate and personal key in which religious and mythological symbols, traditions and legends of the Western, Eastern, African and Arabian world converge.

For over thirty years, Maïmouna’s research has aimed to overcome cultural, social, linguistic, ethnic and religious barriers, «playing» with opposites as in I Would like to know you or Ping Pong Playing in search of an inner balance (Blue Trampoline and Red Trampoline). The artist starts from the citation of the great invention of Western painting – perspective – and like Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and the tradition of the pre-Renaissance and Renaissance masters, places the human figure at the center of the universe, redeemed in its essence as a thinking person. Behind it all, for her, there is the experience of inner knowledge through her meeting with the Sufism of the Senegalese current Muridiyya, which was followed by her conversion to Islam and the need to convey that same inner metamorphosis: a truly awe-inspiring theme running through the entire pictorial or sculptural, performative, video, photographic and installation work by Maïmouna Guerresi. According to the artist the creative act requires a slow ritual in which the photographic shot is only the last phase of the work; first there is the design and the implementation of costumes, backdrops and sets– dressing for the pose.

The viewers are invited to let themselves be led by their eyes and hearts to enter the immersive space of awareness, tolerance and legality within which ethe most ordinary gesture can become extraordinary.

(Manuela De Leonardis)