Chedly Atallah

In the context of the health crisis, La mystérieuse affaire de styles is an exceptional exhibition at the Villa Belleville launched and prepared with the proposal of Henri Guetten in order to offer artists the opportunity to show their work as well as their workshops.

 

This event brings together a dozen artists including Chedly Atallah, artist in residence at the Cité internationale des arts.

 

 

 

Everyone is suspect. Gathered in the same space at tea time, very different characters await the verdict. Are they artists? It is not impossible. Agatha Christie has made a name for herself by often resorting to closed-door meetings that exacerbate tensions and in which the inspector is at the same level of knowledge as the narrator. Curating is not an infused science but an exercise in thought and deduction. Crime seems to surround Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple wherever they go. Art perhaps surrounds critics wherever they go. A passion can be lodged in any everyday gesture. This kind of narrative device that also appeals to the readers' capacity for deduction, and known as "who did it?", is not the British novelist's own, but has allowed her to display a complicity and a humor that is specific to her. The Mysterious Affair at Styles is Agatha Christie's first novel and if Styles takes the place of a toponym in fiction it has a completely different resonance in the field of art. 

 

 

 

Given a place of production and research but also 11 artists previously selected in residence for a given time, the question of method arises. How can we account for the exchanges that take place at the Villa Belleville? An analytical mind develops by establishing cause-and-effect relationships, by working on memory on the scale of a place. In the workshops, a detail that is seen reminds us of another, a way of assembling words, testing materials, tuning gestures or practicing drawing. The investigation then begins, even before the work is born, when clues point to a gesture or a thought in progress. Sometimes it looks like an alibi or a potential motif.  Of course, the crime remains to be established...

 

 

 

If it is perfect, the crime cannot be a crime reminds us of Jean Baudrillard in Le crime parfait where he proposes to examine the murder of reality. Illusion melts into reality and object and subject, the philosopher ends up arguing, becomes one. And what if showing sometimes contradictory works and different styles, that is to say different creative processes, would allow us to better understand something of art itself?