MARE NOSTRUM

ABOUT:

My piece concerns migrants who have died in the Mediterranean. This painting is called “MARE NOSTRUM”, it was produced in 2019 and unfortunately remains extremely topical. The cemetery of our sea (our mother) MARE NOSTRUM.

 All around the coast line and some stairs and low walls that lead nowhere and are inaccessible. The coasts are contain threatening protections; the rusty spikes of rejection, the anti-migrant devices. On the shores the shrouds of migrants rolled up in the foam of the waves rest on the waste of the joyous pollution of our societies. In the distance, the possibility of an island where the tree of knowledge lives, the tree of three languages ​​…

PATRICK TOUCAS-TERZIAN:

Part of my pictorial work centers around the memory of roots and exile.

Of Armenian origin, I notably produced between 1987 and 2010 a series of 15 large paintings: It was about restoring a kind of fantasised memory, a “memory reconstruction”. The series is called “Memories of out-of-memory”, a title that refers to the idea of ​​a memory reinvented in the wake of the exhumation of roots and in the horizon of a reconstruction. “Memorial reconstruction” is understood to mean the fight against oblivion.