Bègles. FRANCE
April 1994
ODY SABAN
Ody Saban has been interlacing erotic figures for twenty years. The liberty of the multicoloured conjunctions springing out of her visionary memory attests of a fascinating imagination. Sometimes barbarous, sometimes more of a lacemaker, the young woman draws eternally. Or rather, she tattoos, since her arabesques grab the bottom of the papers. Like a net compartmentalizing the incandescence of a loving expression in one’s eyes, Saban’s graphic maze mostly attracts the souls of tightrope walkers. And carries them along.
To the end of the Thousand and One Nights. Her native Turkey, her Jewish mother, her memories of America, her love for Paris: each step gives Ody Saban a new reason to paint. Her figures are strange invertebrate but vibratory nomads, whose genealogy would find its origin in both hearth beating and belly dance. Like turkish delights put into orbit, they revolve and stick together, prefering lightness of ideas, longing for desire and icing sugar rather than earth’s attraction.
Wearing rainbow-coloured camisoles and sequined ballet skirts, the sabanic freaks have large smiles. They disguise their cries, aroused by permanent couplings and numerous childbirth. “Vitality and fantasy are the lifeblood of Hope”, they yell. Around the figures, a display of tangled hair, scales, nails, eyelashes, waves, branches and feathers, trembles. However fuller than an egg, each page thus drawn does not care about the Void. It only communicates with the Essential, the energy. The one which, as Saint Exupéry made his Little Prince say “is invisible for eyes”. But not for Ody Saban’s eyes.
Françoise MONNIN