Discover the first exhibition in France of the young Iranian artist Zahra Zeinali at the Galerie Claire Corcia through some thirty unpublished paintings and drawings.

THE DOLLS HOUSE by Zahra ZEINALI. What can a true artistic temperament aspire to after a youth spent in Iran today? To flee the hassles, prejudices, restrictions, to open wide a window of freedom rich in potentialities that were believed for a long time inaccessible. Zahra Zeinali became a plastic arts teacher for fifteen years. Its students are 6 to 12 years old.

Drawing, sculpture, painting, model design, she teaches them a great diversity of techniques, but above all to think and design freely for themselves, in an atmosphere of joyful creative disorder which, surprisingly, is tolerated by a careful hierarchy. Then she spent four years at the University of Art and Architecture of Tehran. When she landed in France, after a brief abstract period inspired by the rhythms of nature, it was at the time of the Charlie and Bataclan attacks, which marked her deeply, to the point of lastingly darkening the ideal of emancipation and autonomy that she had projected on her stay in Paris. "There is no heaven on earth" she concludes with a melancholy smile. An old doll, bought for 1 euro in a storage room, triggers a click in her. The bitter imprint left by Iranian confinement, the memory of his fifteen years of childhood classes, the loneliness of Parisian exile, all this sentimental nebula finds a plastic metaphor in the image of the doll.

What these delicate earthenware faces, often abused, abandoned, evoke, the childish innocence of their ingenuous gazes, a sort of strange absence from the world of the living, as if their attenuated life took place behind the mystery of a theater curtain, in the backcountry behind the scenes, on the fringes, on the borders of society and life. In each painting, the same little girl returns, prey to a recurring dream, lost in an unfamiliar, hostile environment ... The staging of the canvas or the drawing is subject to a learned disorder, slightly theatrical, evoking happy coincidences. bric-a-brac flea markets. His unconditional admiration for Goya probably inspires his taste for chiaroscuro, for a vibrant and eventful material. Painting that touches the human and the sensitive. Memory of life and pictorial passion intertwine inextricably in an almost organic synthesis. A real painter.

- Xavier Bureau