Ripples, Solo Show: Oussama Garti

From April 15 to May 14, 2022, the Darmo gallery has the honor to welcome the artist Oussama Garti for a solo show at 20 rue Royale in Paris. The exhibition entitled "Ripples" brings together a new series of 17 paintings metamorphosed into low reliefs. 

The works presented show a poetic energy. The gesture is frozen in a clever sculpted drape. The folds hide, cover an ephemeral emotion, a timeless meeting. They echo the multiple destinations of fabrics, turbans and other draperies in history. 

Oussama Garti was born in 1995 in Rabat, Morocco. He now lives between London and Casablanca. The artist's childhood is marked by numerous trips, returns and new departures. These elements allowed him to strengthen his sensitivity and deepen his pictorial and architectural exploration. After learning classical painting, Garti joined the prestigious Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, where he worked on international projects, which gave him rigor, open-mindedness and creativity. Sensitive to social issues, he imagines an architecture capable of reconciling and bringing together oases in the heart of cities. 

His paintings celebrate color and movement; they reflect polyphony, exact irregularity, abstraction and the questioning of space, which he stretches, contorts and interprets. Making canvases by incorporating a textile is no small task. Garti has thought of an extremely precise protocol whose rigor and execution are intended to be effective. 

With an elastic fabric, Oussama plays with the resistance and tension of the medium. The textile, impregnated with a mixture of gesso and plaster, leaves no room for "guilty repentance", as Colin Lemoine explains to us, by the rapid solidification of the materials used. Once his work is set, Oussama takes the time to sand and polish his painting as a sculptor would work his marble. Emeritus art critic and head of sculpture at the Bourdelle Museum, Colin Lemoine is passionate about the work of Oussama Garti, whom he describes as a "master of coating." Here, the body has disappeared. Each of Garti's canvases is like a chrysalis: it embodies the envelope without the letter, the fabric without the body. Colin Lemoine places himself as a spectator of a memory. He claims to be "the witness of a vestige, perhaps of a ruin." Ripples combines history and aestheticism. In contrast to the paragone, Oussama Garti has been able to link painting to sculpture without confronting them.