”Nelly Zagury's Matrice is akin to entering an opera house. It is a total experience, housing not only the stage, but also the chorus and all the complex machinery of protagonists, costumes and choreographies behind the scene. The clay-colored cement of the exhibition room grounds the body of work in a cosmogony summoning the primordial myths of the Mediterranean basin, which under the artist's prism revolves around the matrix - the female uterus guarantor of life.

Two horizontal paintings face one another - each featuring a woman's body awakening or coming back to life. The ethereal forms emerge from  within in a solitary impulse, and unfold in arabesques, volutes and waves of energy in a bold acrylic palette that combines citric yellow, satin pink and ultramarine violet with golden skins. Zagury models the singular strength of these creatures by bringing together plural mythological figures such as the voodoo mermaid Mami Wata or the funerary Egyptian deity Isis. The legacy of the tempting figurehead is transmuted into a supranatural body-vessel that puts up a show under her own rules. Flesh shines like an ornamental armor built with patience and care to finally break away from the receptacle of external desires and become instead a vector of emancipation.

This reappropriation of the body materializes as a fountain - oviform metal trunks overhang a resin basin in the shape of a Botticellian shell. The sculpture echoes the painting Fleur de Papyrus – they are both inspired by the iconography of the union of the Two Lands (Sema-Taouy) in ancient Egypt, symbolized by the white lily and papyrus surrounding a human trachea.

The final act of this joyous erotic hymn is a monumental painting that unfolds from the wall and expands onto steps in apparent levitation. The horizon line shifts through the flying-carpet staircase, and offers a shifting perspective on a flamboyant aurora bordered by four symmetrical profiles of winged cats. The lapis lazuli and gilded felines stand for an allegory of fertility giving way to creative pleasure. Between their wild and protective paws, the platform is to be climbed upon for an oration of uninhibited self-love, mirroring that of a salutary universalism.”

Clara Darrason