Yosef Joseph Yaakov Dadoune. The Cry of Flowers

Born in Nice in 1975, Yosef Joseph Yaakov Dadoune has lived between the South of France and Ofakim, a development town in the Negev on the border with Gaza. This double culture, his feeling of being both from here and elsewhere, and of belonging to the periphery, feeds a work mixing performances, films, choreographies, photographs, drawings and paintings.

Invited by the mahJ, Joseph Dadoune has chosen to present works that are more than fifteen years apart, a way of underlining the foundations that irrigate him, in the museum's contemporary gallery, in the Duke's room and the library. 

On view in the Duke's room is Sion, a film shot in black and white in 2006 in the Louvre. The actress Ronit Elkabetz plays a woman from the desert, dressed all in black, who wanders, alone, from the Egyptian halls to the sculpted decorations of Korsabad, to the French paintings of the 19^th century. Crossing time and civilizations, she personifies the Jewish destiny and its wandering.

The most recent works are presented in the contemporary gallery. His large charcoal drawings of uprooted flowers (2022), are inspired by plants that grow almost without water at the edge of the desert, such as palms, thistles, or asphodel.  For the artist, his flowers "lament and embody bruised women, women damaged by their fate. Who hears them? The wind responds to their despair by sending them a breath of life. The savagery of these black flowers corresponds to the darkness of a humanity at war. The flowers fight and resist. They remain standing.

Image

Légende

Joseph Dadoune Flowers / camouflages, periphery 2023 © ph. Christophe Fouin © Adagp, Paris, 2023

The exhibition also presents a series of red paintings in which hybridisations between organs and plants appear, thorny stems that metamorphose into barbed wire. For the artist, this last series of 2023 has the colour of "blood shed to stay alive".

Finally, in the library, Joseph Dadoune presents his Travel Notebooks where since 2018 he captures in pastel the light of the cities he has crossed from Lisbon to Venice, passing through Jerusalem.

Yosef Joseph Yaakov Dadoune lives and works in Paris. His works are notably kept at the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre Museum, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Petah Tikva Museum.