Malaga,
When, in 2023, the Picasso Museum of Malaga ended the year examining the fingerprints of the author of the Guernica In contemporary artists, one of the participants in that exhibition was the Belgian painter Farah Inassi, from which we could see the piece Sleeping Dancer 3inspired by the Picassian bathers. Not coincidentally, at the beginning of that same year the Picasso Parisino Museum had also given him a sample.
Intena now returns to the Malaga center to exhibit work that has been carried out in the last decade, in a montage, “Genius loci”, which has curated Marjolaine Lévy and that has about twenty works, most of them defined by an expressive use of geometry, by space games and for incorporating references to those held by great figures of contemporary art, Picasso between them.
Born in Brussels in 1981 and resident in Paris, this author has constantly nourished the legacy of both abstract and figurative artists to build their language; It uses grid structures and geometric patterns of cubist inspiration that it places at the service of the generation of artificial spaces in which neither the scales nor the volumes can be interpreted clearly.
The ultimate purpose of Inssi is to invite us to reflect on the representation systems of contemporary art, affecting the frequent search for theatrical effects and complex relationships between figures and funds. These formal disquisitions, which also occupied the totemic artists whose production studies, combines them with the deployment of an aesthetic that inevitably carries the seal of our time.
He Genius loci Of the title of this exhibition, that spirit of the place that protects and prints its character in the atmospheres of the space where it lives, is in this case inevitably Picasso, whose ghosts, in the words of the commission plastic
The sample is structured in four chapters, being the first for the workshop, a subject usually chosen by both Picasso and the Belgian author and for a good number of contemporary creators to make it the headquarters of their thoughts about the painting conventions. In the compositions of ASSI, we will contemplate female models at rest with empty racks and virgin canvases, in works that show the characteristic grid with which she balances many of her canvases.
In The mechanical cabareton the other hand, we will find female bodies in motion according to meticulous choreographies of legs, hoops and balls, while The shore It collects exterior scenes of bathers that tan on beaches represented by horizontal smooth colors, in stripes corresponding to the blue sky, the turquoise sea and the beige sand.
The route is closed with the section Through the windowin which female characters surrounded by flowers and fruits rest next to windows from which to observe cloudy skies and starry nights.
We can have the feeling that the works gathered here seem to have been built according to the parameters of architecture, without pretending in any case to be constituted as reliable representations: the precise lines and the aforementioned objects simulate belong to a parallel world, which is familiar but not quite, and in which time remains in suspense. Guitar, juggling pieces, cards, phones and tambourines appear so synthesized in their forms that sometimes they are not recognized as real world articles; Like angles and curved shapes they suggest bodies, faces, objects or spaces, but they never limit them. That is why their creations have been defined as figurative paintings that represent abstraction.
Farah Inssi. “Genius loci”
Picasso Málaga Museum
C/ San Agustín, 8
Malaga
From May 23 to December 14, 2025
