Afro Melancholy

This is his first personal exhibition in France. Alison Saar, 65, living in Los Angeles, is one of those African-American artists that the European art world is bringing to light today. Inspired by art brut, but also by her mother, the sculptor Betye Saar, who for a long time created her assemblies in her kitchen, Alison Saar likes to divert household objects to which she lends a spiritual power, as in certain Caribbean myths. His woodcuts, drawn on tea towels or handkerchiefs, implicitly evoke the memory of slavery, like these Reapers (“Reapers”) with braids adorned with cotton flowers. In Congolene Resistance, she shows a woman biting a straightening comb between her teeth, to denounce the canons of Western beauty. His black Venuses, whose hair sometimes merges with streams of tears or skeins of threads, exude a real mixture of strength and melancholy.