I met Michel Nedjar during a seminar held at Villa Vassilieff in Montparnasse one month ago. The seminar was dedicated to Teo Hernández, Nedjar’s companion during almost 20 years. The love story between them was encompassed with an artistic research. After the seminar, Nedjar invited me to an exhibition held at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaisme, in which I discovered that the encounter between Nedjar and Hernández “produced” two really different works.
The exhibition, curated by Nathalie Hazan-Brunet, gathered selected works, most of them from a recent donation Nedjar made to the museum. Nedjar’s artistic work began in 1976, after a travel to Mexico with Teo Hernández, where he discovered dolls of Mexican tradition, that detonated his artistic carrier. During his childhood, he used to stole the dolls of his two sisters for play with them secretely, after what he buried them in the house’s garden. Some years later, when he was a teenager, Nedjar was learning from his father the profession of tailor. But Mexico’s travel brought to him an unexpected issue in which he could turned back to dolls’ childhood universe and at the same time implement some techniques of tailoring. He started a creative exploration producing different series of dolls, drawings and masks, that progressively became semi-ritual objects, aesthetically and symbolically. At this time, he suffered a strong depression during which he continued making dolls, and it was in that moment that he discovered an unexpected mystical power in the creative process… He explain this to Sylvia Kummer in the interview “Michel Nedjar, who are you?”, in Johann Feilacher, Animô. Vienna, Springer-Verlag, 2008:
Once, I was immersing a doll in the hot water, the mud, I lost consciousness, my whole identity. I transgressed the stages of the plants and minerals. I was nothing; I touched the core of the universe. I was frightening, it was horrible, yet fantastic at the same time. But it only lasted two or three seconds. I recovered and quickly lifted the doll out of its bath. This experience made such an impression on me that I wanted to relive it -this mystical and overwhelmig state in which I touched the core of the universe. I was very frightening, it was horrible, yet fantastic at the same time. But it only lasted two or three seconds. I recovered and quickly lifted the doll out of its bath. This experience made such an impression on me that I wanted to relive it -this mystical and overwhelming state in which I touched upon the origin of the universe. But it has never been possible since. During those years I had so much energy, an uncanny vigor, that I filled the entire studio with lugubrious dolls, It looked like the inside of a dim grotto. Sometimes I say that I haven’t created but rather exhumated something, like an archeologist. I didn’t know what I had unearthed, but I did know that I wanted to hold on to that state. I also know that what happened with the dolls at the time was very important. And I keep saying that the dolls have saved me.
Sawing the different works exhibited in the MAHJ, it appears to me that they are touched by this quasi-ritual preparation of dolls that make this art process to looks like cooking, in the same way that a ritual process could be.