This first solo show in Paris of Spanish artist María Dávila presents a series of pastels centered on her childhood and her family.
Extracted from the autobiography The Words of Jean-Paul Sartre, the title "I had learned to see myself through their eyes" reflects the exercise of self-analysis in which she engaged to propose "a visual approximation of the experience of the first gaze as a founding aspect of personality". At the age when her mother gave birth to her first child, María Dávila started to revisit some video recordings from this time period. After having selected "a series of photograms translated into pictorial medium", she sought to "essentially delve two key questions: firstly, the search for maternal and paternal figures with whom to identify; secondly, this inevitable splitting of memory between the recollection of what was experienced and the technical image that replaces it".
In this prelinguistic stage of life, the presence of others conditions our own perception and begins to shape our character under the effect of their gaze. The rekindling of this familiar world of faces, places and sensations retrospectively triggers a reconstruction of facts, impressions and state of mind of her close relations. By using her father's films with a now outdated rendering, María Dávila takes his place and sees herself through his eyes: and by recreating her own images from these reels, she returns his look in a sort of reflection on filiation, mimesis and otherness.
The series is solely made up of interior scenes, bodies in back light or in motion, full front gazes which reveal the viewer's situation. Added to the combination or superposition of several images from the same sequence, it produces a strange and intimate atmosphere, a dreamlike and spectral poetry. This feeling of fragility is intensified by the technique used - pastel - because of its powdery texture. Unlike some of her previous paintings, María Dávila worked by adding layers and colors, in optical mixing, in a condensation of gestures that erase the limits and the contours of forms.
"I had learned to see myself through their eyes" offers a sensitive journey towards the memory of childhood. It is an attempt to bring the past back to life while being aware of its impossibility, to show these elusive shadows which seem to hide behind the visible. By linking these different sources - the memory, the eye of others, the technical image, the work of art - María Dávila materializes this founding experience of awakening to oneself and to others in order "to resurrect a memory that is both alive and extinct". From her experience, she in turn projects the viewer into his own story, between nostalgia and reappropriation, giving it a fresh perspective.
