Hady Sy - Marégramme de l’amour

While what we call globalization, liberalism, religious fanaticism and even consumerist infantilizing is quietly taking over as a form of suicide of what was, or attempted to be, humanity – otherwise said, a possibility of living together- Hady Sy keeps warning us again and again. With lucidity, his work points out our helplessness and makes us feel the failure of words, arguments and, of course, of the current thinking of our world. The series of artworks he has produced over the last years (such as Not For Sale or One Blood) have in common to bear witness of the failure of all utopias and hopes in front of the inevitable progress of the worst case scenario. However, Marégramme de l’amour is probably one of his most overtly enchanting and poetic pieces.

At the beginning, LOVE BIBLE was the idea of an artist book which premise is to be found in a commission from 1998 for the 40^th anniversary of Yves Saint-Laurent. The book modestly entitled LOVE was published in two languages: English and French. In the following years, noticing how much hatred and exclusion pervaded medias and political agendas, Hady Sy regularly revisited the project, without however finding the ideal form for it. LOVE BIBLE is its final outcome. This book was born out of the desire to talk about love, to speak about every people and culture, meaning almost 408 languages and dialects. Marégramme de l’amour is the plastic rendering of this desire. Four different plates, four big roll prints on which the artist has spread out the book with photographs to punctuate the stream of love words. While the first one, made in 2008 with black and white images, follows the invocation of a lost love, the second one, made with X-ray images in 2007, is a passionate and exhilarated answer to the opening of a dreadful exhibition on war weapons. The third one in shades of blue and the fourth one in shades of red were specifically made for Hady Sy’s Beirut project in 2017.

Through this edition of 12, Hady Sy builds a complex installation in which words answer images and the meaning of a simple sentence, “I love you”, dialogue with extremely simple pieces of nature: a leaf, a flower. The incompatibility between the cult of oneself and the urging questions asked by social life are here solved, as if the sovereign energy of love still had the power to transcend the barriers and frontiers than men nowadays put so much effort into building.