Incandescence

Born in 1981 in Swaida el-Kafer in Syria, Nagham Hodaifa has lived and worked in France since 2005. She studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Damascus University before embarking on a course in art history at the Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, where she defended her thesis on Marwan Kassab Bachi, which she published in 2018 under the title Marwan, face à face.

The central theme of Hodaifa’s work is the human condition, which she explores through the representation of the body. The body, anonymous, stripped or draped, whole or fragmentary, is sometimes transformed into a landscape and becomes a geography of the intimate.

On small-format paper or monumental canvases, Hodaifa's painting expresses an ardour and freedom that unfold in vibrant colours. The pigments, ground in the studio using the old-fashioned way, are dominated by greens (duck green, bluish green, emerald green, English green, Veronese green, and others), sometimes balanced by flamboyant reds and golds. It's a thick material that covers the canvas, deposited energetically, in a body to body relationship with the paint. It's a hand-to-hand relationship that is also expressed in performance paintings, in which Hodaifa surrounds herself with musicians, dancers, poets, singers or video artists... as in 2019, when she created two performances for the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, entitled The Night Attire and Mirage... Sarâb.