Taking place within the living spaces of NARANJO 141, Une fenêtre à soi is a duo-exhibition of two young visual artists based in Mexico: Emiliano de Ezkauriatza (b.2000, Monterrey, MX) and Antoine Granier (b.1993, Paris, FR).

Translated as “a window of one’s own”, the show’s title references both artists’ insightful use of pictorial practice as a portal to candid visions, their oneiric interest in the enigmatic and their shared challenge to the rationality of form. Unconcerned with our readiness to decipher that which defies our reasoning, Granier and de Ezkauriatza craft three-dimensional portholes to otherworldly fictions that push us to oscillate between permanent evasiveness and active interaction, in a kaleidoscopic web of textures, technology and light. La fenêtre fait naître; the window gives birth. The paronomastic pun of this French word holds true.

In NARANJO 141’s most domestically identifiable space, these windows offered by the artists, who both prefer textured, box-like wooden frames to canvas supports, most certainly depict an escape from banal material life and look to the fantastic: poetic gestures sourced in magic, utopia and mystery. Though distinctive in their style and technique, both trigger the realm of childhood fantasies and the ethereal qualities of psychological landscapes. They elaborate mystical compositions drawing their inner workings from sources as varied as cinematized parlor magic, trompe-l’oeil hallucinations and post- (or pre-) apocalyptic utopias. In their video practices, Emiliano de Ezkauriatza and Antoine Granier poetically play with illusion, quiproquo and ludicism to expand the scope of their material work, re-enchanting the banality of physical existence with the “erudite madness” hiding in plain sight in its interstices, those spectacular cracks in the wall unlocked by the sheer power of our gaze. In their visions, will-o’-the-wisps, fountains, tongues, eyes, beams, ghosts, eyes, poisonous flowers, flames and tears are but vehicles to emancipate from time, space and structure altogether, diaphanous glyphs encrypting forking paths.

Shall we let ourselves be guided by a map meant to make us lose our way rather than find it?

Text by Adrian de Banville

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