Galerie Cécile Fakhoury presents Rachel Marsil’s solo exhibition, J’aimerais me voir dans tes yeux [I would like to see myself in your eyes] in Dakar, Senegal. For her first solo exhibition, Rachel Marsil plunges us into an intimate and colourful universe on the border between memories and dreams.

Originally, Rachel Marsil dives into her family photographs; each scene is an opportunity to revisit a memory, sometimes eveil of the mind. The colours, however intense and warm, create a thread from one work to the next, making each canvas like a moment in an imaginary story.

Some elements nevertheless keep us from the risk of absolute onirism; in particular the objects that the artist adds to her paintings. Rachel Marsil represents them in the same way as the characters, making them protagonists of the visual narrative in their own right. The objects carry a sensitive and memorial weight. They crystallise as many moments as emotions experienced by the artist and at the same time send us back to our intimate sphere contemplating our own Proust’s madeleine and our own forgetfulness. Thus, the two ceramic vases created in collaboration with the artist Esther Hien are literally receptacles of memory. The exploration of embroidery and fabric work is an opportunity for Rachel Marsil to subtly address the question of memory through the transmission of knowledge and the preservation of know-how. It is also an opportunity to appeal to the plural poetics of the link that binds together people, objects and places in an indestructible way.

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