PARIS.- As the new art season starts, Magda Danysz gallery hosts from September 6th the artist YZ for a solo show in Paris. YZ is an atypical artist in the French contemporary art scene. Using painting or chinese ink, with brushes, paintrolls and stencils, her art is based on different methods to create a homogenous body of work. In this exhibition, she offers a multidude of various materials, pieces on canvas, original creations on urban zinc and huge wood installations. For this exhibition Magda Danysz gallery shows the artist’s world in an immersive way.

YZ paints without tricks. She develops an intimist universe made of feminine portraits from another time, angels with sculpted forms and urban landscapes. Around her series "Women from another century", "Angels" and "Lost in the city" the exhibition highlights her unique style which combines her drawing sensitivity and her subtle gradations from black to white with many layers to create intense depth. YZ sets her universe in sepia tones, which seems fade with time.

Alternately, dreamy, languorous, provocative, the large feminine portraits come together side by side next to her "buildings portraits". A balance appears between her classic iconographic approach and the strong influence of urbanity - especially by using materials from the street. One witnesses a new aesthetic emergence, inspired by the beautiful decay spirit, yet eternal and modern. YZ calls out to our mind about the place of humans in the city.

Intimist and small-size creations or large format installations, the artist’s poetic atmosphere between human and urban surrounds the gallery in its entirety for this exhibition.

London Adventure, is a London City portrait. It is a walk around London districts, Mayfair, London bridge, Hackey, Finsbury, Shoreditch …

This portrait is a part of a global project « Lost in the city ».

Buildings frontages, traffic signs, and emblems talk together with a set of nude untitled « Ladybird ». This woman refers to the woman narrator of « The London Adventure » by Virginia Woolf. It talks about a London woman, travelling through the city looking for a pen to write.

There is also a parallel between this naked woman and the city revealed by its frontages. Frontages are a cover, a city container. Frontages hide a thousand inhabitants stories who are living in these buildings.

The paintings are realised on wood, on slate or also on recycled brick from Bond Street buildings. Materials are talking about city and bring with them, a story and an energy. Pieces on wood seem to come from another time. The visual appears on a medium or may be, disappears. The silk paper is always there.

THE CITY
What is our connection with the city ? How do we place ourselves in this space? Where is our intimacy? How can we live together? City is not an evidence. Its history, its inhabitants make each city unique. Architecture changes according to districts and materials define colours and the atmosphere.

Each city has its own identity, more strong when we travel to an other country or an other continent. Climatic, cultural, religious or demographic differences make each city unique and show some specificities. This way, these specificities are the reflect of our society conditions and they focus on contemporary urban problems : pollution, overpopulation, economic decline, growth, climatic and environmental fragilities. «

Lost in the city » is a travel though contemporary cities : by comparing them, cities reveal themselves, talk about our past, about present and about our future.

NUDITY
Nudity involves to take off all things, to tear all the veils. To be naked, it is to take off our protective cover to reveals ourselves in the huge simplicity and also in a huge misery. It is all about accepting our naked human condition.

« A London Adventure » by Virginia Wolf - Extract How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree–sprinkled, grass–grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light—windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars—lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing–room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which——She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?