Jérémie Cosimi, born in 1990 in Bastia, is a French painter based in Marseille.
A light bursts forth in the darkness and caresses the rough skin of a citrus fruit, the viscose of tracksuits, the craggy surface of a ruin, the pleats of a sheet, or the cavernous grooves of a seashell. It illuminates objects, bodies, and situations pushed to their peak. It sets fire to the landscape, theatricalizes figures and portraits, while also underscoring the silence of things—rendered in paint or drawing.
Jérémie Cosimi’s works unfold a fragmented story, composed of flashes and absences. Without adhering to a fixed or grandiloquent narrative, they root themselves in an intimate relationship with the subjects depicted. These subjects emerge from the artist’s everyday life and are transposed—through the prism of staging—into spaces whose locality is sometimes uncertain.
The subjects often echo short stories or long poems written by the artist, which elude our reading. The aim is not to offer something to be read, but to be seen. These words then subtly permeate his process and inspire gestures that, little by little, become scenes.
From large formats to miniatures, Jérémie Cosimi shapes a universe at once strange and familiar. He maintains a direct closeness to the subjects he depicts, while shifting them into liminal and often anachronistic settings. Tight framings and pared-down sets blur the relationship to temporality.
The depicted elements thus become archetypes, questioning the continuities and variations that flow through the course of our history. To employ chiaroscuro, to reinvest the genre scene or the still life, is to weave forms of heritage—to dig into the present as one does into the past, and to bring forth from seemingly trivial things immutable forms.
To feast one’s eyes on a slice of melon, to confront the interlacing of bodies and folds, to let one’s gaze plunge into a distant horizon—these appear as so many invitations to invest the banal and the familiar, to affirm their significance, even their extraordinariness. Each work thus becomes a fragment, no longer of a single, linear narrative, but of individual and collective memories shared.
— Thomas Fort, exhibition critic