Jetlag Paradiso & Bloody Sea by Alix Delmas, 23 November 2016

FOR HER NEW SERIES of photographic work, Alix Delmas has chosen to exhibit online. Using the dimension of the online world – that is, one without territorial borders – for this exhibition is very important to the artist. ‘Jetlag Paradiso’ and ‘Bloody Sea’ are a vision of our troubled times of global warming, coastal erosion and our fear of invasion. These images invite you to view the world – the way it works and the stark realities it hurls at people – through a filter, in the subdued harmonies of colour, shade and night time.

The landscape of Jetlag Paradiso seems manipulated, as if overwhelmed by an artificial visual effect. The exotic shore recalls those discovered by our explorer-ancestors, always in search of the new elsewhere, much the same as what is today offered to tourists. The purplish section - the cyanose - seems to bear the traces of a deluge. An erosion of the landscape of the interior is an erosion which is transferred to the image itself. From any point of view, this purple gelatin reveals the ordeal a coastline experiences holding its own against tornadoes. It is, above all, a metaphor on the fragility of the landscape and its physical and photographic degradation, as if the landscape itself had lost its clarity.

Alix's ‘Bloody Sea’ resists a direct narrative, instead revealing eerie, red-tinged 'atmospheres'. We watch as they advance towards us, menacing, threatening our cosy lives set comfortably behind the ramparts. This is a spectral vision of the sea, the Mediterranean Sea, in which thousands of people so far have lost their lives attempting to cross from one shore to another. The sea itself speaks only of the sea. It is our imaginations which create the falsehood and fear - and this fear lies within us.

The dimension of the online exhibition is not within the territory of any country; it is outside the dimensions of any territory.

BIOGRAPHY
Alix Delmas (France) born in Bayonne in 1962, lived in Dakar (Senegal) until she was 14 years old. She went off to study painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Delmas is a versatile, even protean, and fundamentally experimental artist.The photographic and video “mises en scene” that she constructs blend performance and sculpture, paint and light. These installations shake up our shared perceptions of interior places and exterior spaces.The sensation of going off-piste and the intrusive territories present in her work - surely derived from perceptions formed in her childhood as French and foreign, of both here and elsewhere – allow her to tackle the idea of the outside, the in-between, the beside, through visual arts, from a reversed or opposing position. Everything is ambiguous ; nothing is simply a symptom. She is never within one exclusive domain but, rather, accentuates porous boders, creating permeabilities from one domain to the next. She develops an aesthetic of the interval, of the in-between, that is less a matter of widening the space between objects than of apprehending the rich density of their possible connections. The world presented by Alix Delmas does not have a build-in Global Positioning System. Heterogeneous, it can be characterizied before all else as affective, social, erotic. Different worlds unfold, mingle, and merge with that curious quality their momentaly borders have of generating back and foth movements, in short a kind of transit. Thus nothing is defined, and nothing is definitive. Less