Jessy Razafimandimby (born in 1995, Madagascar) lives and works in Geneva. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the Geneva University of Art & Design (HEAD) in 2018.
His multidisciplinary production encompasses painting, drawing, installations, and performance. Often, these practices converge, finding the artist manipulating fragmented decorative objects and textiles, which extend the work beyond its frame. These extensions reveal a clash between sculpture and painting, staged by Razafimandimby. The artist brings a world inherited from the past back to life, making reference to French cinema of the 1960s, jazz music, design, and postwar architecture. He pays particular attention to the history of interior decoration and ornamentation, as well as social conventions and the “good manners” traditionally linked to a conservative way of life and promoted by a classist bourgeois system.
Jessy Razafimandimby’s obsessions take place principally within the home, and the practice of the artist is accordingly criss-crossed with references to domesticity and collective memory. Coexisting in his paintings are human figures and animals - but also chimerical figures that express Razafimandimby’s utopic and dystopic projections. These seem at times to merge, to mutate into new and complex forms that reveal the artist’s interest in the question of becoming. It is not as much what we become, as with whom we become it - the collective experience - that Razafimandimby interrogates. The figures detailed by the artist are extracted from a pictorial space in which they could be contained, and projected into a present, sensorial space, that of the exhibition. In such a way, he conceives joyously disordered, agitated environments, inspired by fictional domestic environments inhabited by strange masses of objects and drapery, ghostly in affect. These territories are inhabited by Razafimandimby’s fictional hosts, becoming a vestigial space in which the artist engages physically, employing the household as a metaphorical framework to question notions of taste, belonging, and power. He interrogates the ability of humans to construct relations with their environment, at times merging with it. These relations are imbued with attention, tenderness, and confusion.
Jessy Razafimandimby is one of the winners of the Kunstpreis Kiefer Hablitzel 2021 - Swiss Art Awards. He has had solo shows at Valentin 61, Lausanne (2022); Sans titre, Paris (2022); Art au Centre, Geneva (2021); 13 vitrine, Renens (2021); Espace HIT, Geneva (2021); Arsenic, Lausanne (2020); 1.1., Basel (2020). In 2023, the artist will be the subject of solo exhibitions at Hakanto Contemporary, Antananarivo and at A.ROMY, Zurich
