Jessy Razafimandimby at 2023 Dhaka Art Summit

Photo credit: Ulysse Lozano

Jessy Razafimandimby lives and works in Geneva. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the Geneva University of Art & Design (HEAD) in 2018. Razafimandimby is participating in the 2023 edition of ‘Dhaka Art Summit: Bonna’.

He conceives joyously disordered, agitated environments, inspired by fictional domestic environments inhabited by strange masses of objects and drapery, ghostly in affect. These territories are inhabited by Razafimandimby’s fictional hosts, becoming a vestigial space in which the artist engages physically, employing the household as a metaphorical framework to question notions of taste, belonging, and power. How do these ideas translate across cultures, and how were they carried across the world through colonization? Jessy also works with cane craft histories to create his work – a shared material history with Bangladesh, where his work will be shared at Dhaka Art Summit.

Jessy Razafimandimby’s multidisciplinary production encompasses painting, drawing, installations, and performance. Often, these practices converge, finding the artist manipulating fragmented decorative objects and textiles, which extend the work beyond its frame. These extensions reveal a clash between sculpture and painting, staged by Razafimandimby. The artist brings a world inherited from the past back to life, making reference to French cinema of the 1960s, jazz music, design, and post-war architecture. He pays particular attention to the history of interior decoration and ornamentation, as well as social conventions and the “good manners” traditionally linked to a conservative way of life and promoted by a classist bourgeois system.

Jessy Razafimandimby’s obsessions take place principally within the home, and the practice of the artist is accordingly criss-crossed with references to domesticity and collective memory. Coexisting in his paintings are human figures and animals – but also chimerical figures that express Razafimandimby’s utopic and dystopic projections. These seem at times to merge, to mutate into new and complex forms that reveal the artist’s interest in the question of becoming. It is not as much what we become, as with whom we become it – the collective experience – that Razafimandimby interrogates.

The figures detailed by the artist are extracted from a pictorial space in which they could be contained, and projected into a present, sensorial space, that of the exhibition. In such a way, he conceives joyously disordered, agitated environments, inspired by fictional domestic environments inhabited by strange masses of objects and drapery, ghostly in affect.

These territories are inhabited by Razafimandimby’s fictional hosts, becoming a vestigial space in which the artist engages physically, employing the household as a metaphorical framework to question notions of taste, belonging, and power. He interrogates the ability of humans to construct relations with their environment, at times merging with it. These relations are imbued with attention, tenderness, and confusion.