Roger Cardinal

Invitation carte solo exhibition
Ody SABAN Arabesque Renewed

Une Sardine Collée Au Mur Gallery 

2005 Geneva Switzerland

                            Arabesque renewed

                   When she draws, Ody Saban is like a person weeping, passive, piteous, as if afflicted. Barefoot and huddled upon herself, she peers down at the reflection on the frozen paper. At first smudged and ineffectual, her hasty scrawls grow bolder and more assertive as she bends over them. Soon she begins to release a strange expressive outpouring, a visual glossolalia which spawns the signs of a new alphabet of passion. In truth, she doesn’t draw, she embroiders. She doesn’t write, she sighs. She doesn’t kiss, she bites. Her ever nimble calligraphy can give shape to a volcano or an eruption of birds, and wherever it passes, it inspires the crackling tattoo of dozens of declarations of love. Hybrids born in the gap between verbal phrase and pictorial figure, the traces left on the surface by these scribblings are like so many scratches surprised upon a bare shoulder. It’s as if Ody’s tremulous pen were sketching a call to departure, speaking of migration, of exile, of remote spaces to be crossed on the journey from today’s nest to tomorrow’s cloud. Yet, like constellations drowned in black ink, her little shapes struggle to emerge from obscurity; within the warm shadows, they seem muffled, pressed against a lazed and perfect skin. This indefinable embrace emits a continuous undulating murmur within which may coil a rare and striking turn of phrase: “This is not a night of insomnia, it’s entire days of insomnia”.