Born 1977 in Antananarivo, Madagascar Lives and works in Paris, France and Antananarivo, Madagascar

“A journey hoping to be tomorrow’s. A journey towards another situation or perhaps the same one. One that still is not exhausted, one described only by its first traces, which don’t provide the keys to its future. And which remains mysterious. Almost like an unsuccessful triumph. Why doesn’t this black curtain with ethereal transparency float? The black curtain is a lace veil over reality, concern passing over the features of a loved face. A proclamation of a mourned love? A mourned friendship? A mourned memory? And there are no geographies in the world as good as where I am going to take you”

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Joël Andrianomearisoa presents the major new commission THERE MIGHT BE NO OTHER PLACE IN THE WORLD AS GOOD AS WHERE I AM GOING TO TAKE YOU, 2020. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Andrianomearisoa uses sheer black curtains to initiate a series of veilings, creating a work that rests across and between moments in the Gallery’s collections, occupying a liminal ‘edge’ space. Bearing poetic combinations of words and text, these fabric interventions constitute a playful counter-architecture. Transcending categorisations based on chronology, style, or geography, they accentuate what is already present – the way our spectatorship unfolds as we cross a room, the way our eyes catch some details over others, or the imagined stories and emotional shifts that can be brought forth by an encounter with an artwork. Andrianomearisoa reminds us that the sensual content of these paintings is already there but is sometimes lost within the ‘civilising rituals’ of museum space. Across three levels of the MCA, Andrianomearisoa’s textile installation weaves a multi-storied trail that resonates with his companion piece in the Court Galleries of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His work veils and drifts between solid descriptions of space, shifting an experience of the galleries that plays with our perceptions, and what we can and can’t see. Time is void in Andrianomearisoa’s installations; the layered textiles quietly invoking memory and emotion. The work of Joël Andrianomearisoa develops around a non-explicit, often abstract narration, which can be perceived but to which a name cannot be given. His world of forms weaves his work into sequences often mired in a deep sadness caused by an absence that is impossible to fill. And for that he uses, in no hierarchical order, sound in its immaterial dimension or the book in its hyper materiality, silky textile or rough plastic, black or the most shimmering colours.