MY OTHER SELF
Samuel Aiwerioghene, Victor Puš-Perch, Lea Simhony

Gallery Mathilde Le Coz  presents My Other Self, a collective exhibition bringing together paintings by three European artists: Samuel Aiwerioghene (Denmark), Victor Puš-Perchaud (France) and Lea Simhony (Germany). From identity building to self-affirmation, from the relationship to the other to existence with others, these three artists are representative of an egotistical and intimate contemporary painting that questions identity processes and examines our being-in-the-world.  

For Victor Puš-Perchaud, this quest for identity goes through self-exploration. Captured by the hyper-sensitive surface of the canvas, put at a distance by the frame, its interiority becomes other, one other to observe and tell. Using the motif of the mirror and cropping images into different scenes, the artist develops a sequenced personal narrative, a self-fiction in which he becomes an actor in a foreign pictorial narrative. The use of the self-portrait, a reflection of oneself which, on the canvas, becomes other, allows a greater interior progression, a fall towards oneself with universal scope. 

If self-portrait makes me one other, the portrait of the other that is not me allows, similarly, an intimate exploration of self-identity. Lea Simhony portrays women who do not exist, women who, alone on the scene of the painting, let themselves being watched as they offer themselves to the look of others. Models, muses or actresses - never passive - they sustain the viewer's gaze.  From one canvas to the next, from one persona to the next, the painter plays with the pictorial variations of her interiority. These composite figures - her invented otherness - are her many faces, fragmented alter egos, archipelized in each of her works. 

The virile and tense bodies of Samuel Aiwerioghene testify to a similar process. A character with an apprehensive gaze accompanies, lumpy and tight, the spectator from canvas to canvas. This man on edge - the painter's pictorial alter ego? - is shot through with emotions that resurface in grains on the surface of the painting. The united backgrounds, minimalist and sober, evacuate any narration, prohibit any distraction. This sensitive double is alone with others - his eyes are riveted on the exterior of a scene in which, it seems, he cannot take part. 

From self-observation in the mirror to asserting oneself on the canvas and questioning one's existence in relation to others, Victor Puš-Perchaud, Lea Simhony and Samuel Aiwerioghene paint the complex enigma of identity and difference. With painting, a process essential to their being-in-the-world, these image makers make fiction of reality to better detect its contours. The canvas allows them the pictorial experience of others - this Sartrean "me who is not me" - My Other Self. 

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