Uncanny Nature: Paris, France

The Bridge Gallery is pleased to present Uncanny Nature, a group show featuring three young contemporary artists from Africa and its Diaspora: Méné (b. 1977, Ivory Coast), Cinthia Sifa Mulanga (b. 1997, Democratic Republic of Congo) and Georgia Semple (b. 1995, United Kingdom).

At the heart of each artist’s practice lies a surrealist fascination with form, and what happens when it begins to shift. Méné, also called the African Miró, merges human and animal forms creating hybrid beings that blur the boundary between the earthly and the spiritual. Cinthia Sifa Mulanga constructs interior spaces of precise architecture and quiet strangeness, compositions that evoke the uncanny stillness of De Chirico, holding the Black feminine body with both rigour and mystery. Georgia Semple bends perception itself, deforming bodies and objects as if seen through glass or dream, pulling the eye into a world where nothing quite holds its shape.

That surrealist impulse, in all three practices, is rooted in the body and in what surrounds it. Both Méné and Semple draw from ancient visual traditions: Méné's work is explicitly influenced by rock art, his human figures and silhouettes shaped by a practice that seeks to continue an ancient civilisation enriched by modernism; Semple incorporates embroidery referencing ancient Guyanese cultural garments, adorned with motifs derived from petroglyphs, into layered surfaces combining collage, acrylic, and oil. In Mulanga's constructed interiors, the surreal pressure comes from a different source. The rooms her figures inhabit are lined with painted or collaged images of women sourced from western art history and popular culture, presences that bear down on her subjects and make visible the structures through which female beauty and identity have been historically defined.

It is this quality of pressure, of reality strained to its limit, that gives all three bodies of work their particular tension. Semple's figures shift between clarity and obscurity, thin passages of dry-brush delicacy giving way to gestural thickness, earthy palettes fracturing against vivid highlights: the surreal here is bound to faith, to scripture, to the spiritual cost of sin and the challenge of living by values at odds with the surrounding world. Méné's silhouettes achieve strangeness through reduction, sketched in a manner that is deceptively clumsy, possessing at once the freshness of children's artwork and the weight of an adult confrontation with the world. In Mulanga's rooms, the uncanny is pushed through accumulation: works within works, women looking at women looking at women, until the space feels inhabited by more presences than any single painting could contain.