Numa Amun: Absoluité

Standing in front of one of Numa Amun’s paintings means contemplating the precision of the gesture, marvelling at the manic meticulousness of the work, and letting oneself be guided by the artist’s obsession with line and colour. It means admiring his infinite patience, so antithetical to our era, through which Amun develops a rigorous plan that leaves nothing to chance. It takes the artist more than one year to paint a single work. It is hard to believe that these paintings, mysteriously recessed into the walls, were created using entirely analogue methods, without resorting to any digital tools, by perfecting a squaring technique that could have existed two thousand years ago.

The exhibition Absoluité presents Amun’s most recent work. Three hyperrealist paintings attempt to represent something that is not usually visible: three characters caught in the middle of the mysterious, subjective experience of astral projection. Also referred to as an out-of-body experience, this state occurs when a person has the sensation that their consciousness separates from their physical body. Amun has chosen to represent this displacement of consciousness outside of the bodily shell by trying to represent the body in all its exactness. The colours and textures evoke muscles, unwittingly reminding us that the heart, lungs, intestines also exist under the skin.

In this exhibition, Numa Amun approaches the contemplative experience as a meditation on feeling, to the point of disconnecting body and mind. In so doing, he summons the invisible through a fragmentation of colour, like a fragmentation of reality.