"By reminding us of the Legend of Ys, I wanted to highlight the mythological roots of the rising waters in Brittany, when it is predicted that only Île-aux-Moines and Île d'Arz will still be emerging in the Gulf of Morbihan in fifty years' time," explains Emmanuel Daydé, the exhibition's curator. But I went looking for two artists from another sea, the Mediterranean, to bring in other echoes. Giving his princess of Ys the breast of Artemis of Ephesus, Mâkhi Xenakis has also poured onto paper a deluge of blue ink, stabilising in endless rolls, maëlstroms and great waves five metres long, recalling the dizzying waters that engulfed him in Corsica with his father, the composer Iannis Xenakis. In residence at Kerguéhennec last October, the Franco-Lebanese artist Zad Moultaka also took on the elements to create his immense Glaz - the name given in Breton to the infinite variations in the colour of the waves at high tide - a ten by five metre sheet of paper. But with no assistance other than that of his small body in the rain, he abdicated all grandiloquence in favour of a humble contact with the water thrown at him by the heavens. Taking up the back-and-forth temporality of the palindrome that he loves as much for his musical compositions as for his installations - like Šamaš in the Lebanese pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale - Moultaka added the video of a deluge of images made from a model of a waterfall and the statuary presences of seven paper-earth cones from which the light of gold leaves emerges.

Extract from Tom Laurent's article published in N°105 of Art Absolument magazine. Published on 17 March 2023.

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