Aimée Pedezert

(French - 1988 )

FRUTARIA - Exhibition February/March 2021

Recent drawings

A fruit shop, in times of pandemic, is not just a fruit shop. It's one of the only retail establishments that stays open beyond the strictest hours of the State of Emergency. It allows those in confinement to stretch their legs in the laps of the neighbourhood; to meet up with their neighbours, even from two metres away; to see the half-hidden smile on their face at the prospect of safely eating what they've bought at the small market. The fruit shop is a beacon in the silence of the streets. It's a place where you can find basic necessities and other essentials in today's context.

In the Fruit Shop created especially for Tinta nos Nervos by Aimée Pedezert (Bordeaux, 1988), a French artist who has lived and worked in Lisbon since 2015, the essential goods are artistic, the result of the creative impulse that turns an idea of immobility and suspension of activity on its head. This Frutaria is always open. Because behind closed doors, you can look in the windows to see what's there, because online, on the website, they have set up a virtual stall where you can find persimmons, lettuces, beetroot, cherries, peaches or bananas. With a set of 18 acrylic drawings on paper, realised in broad strokes and quick gestures, Aimée occupies the walls of the gallery, appropriating aesthetically the (in)discipline with which commerce normally makes merchandise available to the gaze and desire of voyeur clients.

The aim here is to flood the entire space with colour. To make the visitor immerse themselves in the intensity of the light on a day when the doors are open again, and to remove the weight of grey days marked by fear and illness. What you want is the opposite.  ‘I just want to draw with colour,’ the artist said in conversation when confronted with the difference from her previous works, which were almost always done in black, with China ink, on a white background.  In each image, which is more or less faithful to the real thing, the fruit and vegetables are above all form and colour, background and figure. The 12 smaller drawings, where you can discover seeds and grains, are visual games of patience, counting time that seems to stretch out, dot by dot, brushstroke by brushstroke.

There's a sense of urgency and unrefined execution that tears the whiteness of the sheet of paper in its sudden chromatic urge. Colour is born with the same unregulated energy with which children discover the power of scratchers. There is no weight or desire for artistic affiliations, although some references are evident. There is no modesty in the puerile expression of the vocabulary found, because all that unites the images created is the sheer fun of making them. Here in a gallery. But it could also be on the street, where Aimée first made her work known.

In one of her first interventions in Lisbon, the artist marked some equipment with phrases written in white on pieces of cardboard. They were recognisable lyrics that punctuated unusual and mundane places with poetry.

But it was when she involved passers-by in an enigmatic game of searching for and recognising the faces she had drawn in thick black strokes on white sheets of paper, which were then glued to the walls and furniture of the city, that she attracted attention. ‘Have you seen this woman / this man?’ was the name he gave to this project of representing possibly identifiable faces, an aggregating motto for the scattered faces which triggered the detective instinct of those who found them to search for meaning. Were they records of reality or fictionalised figures? Could these people actually be found or did each drawing only lead to a renewed encounter with another drawing?

This action revealed a constant aspect of Aimée Pedezert's artistic research: the deep immersion in human and urban life, making drawing a way of relating to and discovering people and spaces. This is why the artist says she draws ‘compulsively, hastily and clumsily’ in the street or ‘in the back of cafés’, on the themes of the ‘human theatre’, faces, gestures, people's habits, social contradictions, but also objects, books, animals, flowers, the sea and ‘things that bring happiness’. And in these, often music, found in musical instruments or through their performers. The series of jazz musicians and singers have been revealing images of this seduction by music that led the artist to create the twotma radio channel on the Spotify platform, where she shares, as an informal DJ, a quasi-soundtrack of her work.

There is a multiform, often collaborative dimension to the images he produces. The drawings are scattered around houses or in books illustrating other people's writings, on the streets, multiplied by the action of friends who help stick them on walls, on original T-shirts or tote bags where the fabric acts as an unpretentious and mobile canvas, in tattoos. Always promoting encounters and relationships with others. The drawing is born, makes sense and promotes encounters. And through it, Aimée celebrates art and life.

Two graphic languages that correspond, in a way, to two fields of work are very evident. On the one hand, there's the restless aspect of rapid drawing and the search for immediate solutions in her exhibition, which gives expression to Aimée's engaged and socially active side. She has participated in many movements to fight racism (with images such as Black Lives Matter and We Are One), to question gentrification and to fight for the right to housing in Lisbon, with street art drawings and ephemeral posters that reveal crisis situations and people's needs.

On the other hand, the distancing from reality with the construction of a purified, poetic vocabulary, detached from the immediate record and based on the lyrical construction of the continuous line, embodying an imagery evocative of major contemporary movements and names such as Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Eduardo Chillida or Ellsworth Kelly.

At Frutaria you could say that the two strands come together in one project: on the one hand, the conceptual nature of what it represents and how it represents it, and on the other hand, the similarity with the idea of improvisation, imperfection and detachment, characteristics of the way in which Aimée Pedezert inserts herself into the community, raising her brush for the right to housing or against racism and now, in Frutaria, for the right to health, to joy, to freedom, to sharing, to culture which, without being named buzzwords, are ideas that inevitably run through the exhibition project.