The series ‘Complex Horizons of Love’ opens as an infinity of horizons in black and white notebooks, between brightness and density, reaching for the intangible and the impossible.
What is to be loved ? The difficulty to love, to be loved, in a world made strange by lust and dream. Can human beings be truly united or are they universally separated by morphology and opposition?
As an artist, Andrianomearisoa’s insistency on the intimate and fragile is yet the work of a surveyor and ethnographer: Mapping out categories of thought and social reality sculpted into immersive environments that simultaneously flatter and deceive; the materials are raw but infinitely delicate, almost at the point of breaking, in a self-contained chaos ready to overflow an entire universe of experience. This experience however boundless, is not circumscribed by aesthetic purity or formal properties: It is broken piecemeal by the dramas of the political body, public sexuality, the global economy and contemporary alienation. The work attempts to confront us with the emotional abstractness of an uncertain liquid world.
Joël Andrianomearisoa (b. 1977) was born in Madagascar and lives and works between Paris, Magnat-l’Étrange and Antananarivo.
Andrianomearisoa’s work encompasses different mediums and materials, seeking to give form to non-explicit, often abstract, narrations. His mixed-media approach – encompassing sculpture, installation, craft, textile, and through unprecedented collaborations – is informed by his Madagascan roots, itself a country of diverse cultural influences. Imbued with complex emotional experiences, his delicate, often ambiguous works are considered an ongoing series of ever-evolving exercises, which consider the aesthetic and architecture of feelings that all perceive, yet cannot put a name to.
In 2019, Andrianomearisoa represented Madagascar at the 58th Biennale di Venezia, and his work has been exhibited in leading global institutions including MAXXI, Rome (2018); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2010); the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC (2015) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2005) and more recently at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021). In 2022, beside OUR LAND JUST LIKE A DREAM at the MACAAL (Marocco), Joël Andrianomearisoa also has a solo exhibition on the continent. Therefore THE FIVE CONTINENTS OF ALL OUR DESIRES overlooks in the Zeitz MOCAA’s atrium (Cape-Town, South Africa). Joël Andrianomearisoa also launched two public sculptures in Antananarivo in October 2021, supported by the Fonds Yavarhoussen. His work forms part of important international collections including the Smithsonian (Washington DC), The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), the Collection Yavarhoussen (Antananarivo) and the Museum Sztuki (Łódź).
In 2016, he received the Arco Madrid Audemars Piguet Prize.
He obtained a diploma degree in architecture from Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture (Paris) in 2003.
Joël Andrianomearisoa is also the founder and artistic director of Hakanto Contemporary, a non-profit independent space for artists in Antananarivo, Madagascar supported by the Fonds Yavarhoussen.
