Christine Sefolosha

Ghost ships, meandering vessels and engulfed shipwrecks have inhabited our imagination, as well as literature and mythology, since The Odyssey and Noah’s Ark. The ocean is an immense, threatening element, a familiar yet dangerous world. The sublime and the horrible are emblematized in it – the finitude of human beings and their aptitude to overcome what overwhelms them, to glimpse the impossible. The depths of the oceans are littered with wrecks that are in themselves so many treasures for our dreams. This sub-aquatic world fascinates us with its magnetic inhospitality, its radical difference.

The universe of Christine Sefolosha’s work possesses that unnerving familiarity, that nocturnal mood, where shapes seem to dissolve before our eyes even as we are seized by their epic beauty. This blurry world engenders monsters that are ours. In these drawings, these monotypes, these ruffled inks, there is no dawn to chase them away. The art of Christine Sefolosha does not protect us from our anxieties. Instead, it captures them in her troubling metaphors, her arachnid allegories, which are without mercy for viewers of their burlesque yet dark extravaganzas.

With the support of Pro Helvetia, Fondation suisse pour la culture. In partnership with les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse.