MEDINAS

Solo exhibition of Julie Alegre, curated by Conchi Alvarez

Julie Alegre is a French artist who has worked with STOA since the beginning of the gallery’s journey in 2006. Throughout these years, Julie has been displaying themes that constitute the fortress of her life, all of them associated with femininity. The same thing occurs in this exhibition, although strictly speaking, the medinas belong to the genre of urban landscape, in reality they are her greatest vindication to women as a gender. Executed in ink on paper, these medinas reflect the artist´s childhood in North Africa where, indelibly, she records her experiences of a fascinating feminine world that explains her attraction to this habitat in which her dreams and reveries take place.

A feminine universe, in which, the opacity exterior of women concealed an enormous wealth that Julie was able to discover, and led to a whole series, “Women in the Hammam”, in which the artist turns a female place of public bathing into witnesses of intimate scenes, away from the male gaze, where women, naked and uninhibited, perform a deep catharsis that permeates the steams of the hammam. Those atmospheres of vivid colours that filled the bathing scenes, symbolize the interior female world, flowing and expanding in a protected place.

On this occasion, the colourful steams have penetrated the walls of these baths and flowed outward, generating, in their external expansion, a multi-coloured air saturated with moisture, sometimes reaching a pure rainfall-runoff. Very different artwork from her first medinas, which were made with oil on canvas, of a more figurative affiliation. In this series, the brushstrokes seem evaporated, since the inks have liquefied and the resulting gouache glides across the paper with Eleusinian impetus, permeating the chaotic characteristic of the architecture of these medinas, colouring them with phantom brushstrokes in such a way that the architectural lines have become blurred, submerged in that idyllic deliquescence that dreams possess.

In this new series of medinas, she has acquired a non-objective art and obtained a concept over shape, creating in most of her art pieces, oppressive atmospheres that symbolize that suffocation and restlessness produced by the lack of freedom.