Paréidolie 2025

Our booth focus will be dedicated to Rosa Maria Unda Souki, born in Venezuela in 1977. The series of unpublished drawings we'll be presenting is a continuation of her overall practice, centered on memory and intimate space, and is the result of a recent trip by the artist to Lisbon (Portugal). During this trip, and because Portugal is a land of exile for the Venezuelan community, the artist rediscovered her country's culinary culture, the taste of fruits, spices and dishes she hadn't had access to for years, in the bends of markets, greengrocers and Latin-American restaurants. What followed was a powerful emotional reminiscence of her childhood, which she was able to reconstruct through her memory of tastes. Through her drawings in watercolor, gouache and colored pencil on paper, the artist offers the viewer a synesthetic experience of memory (of a place, a moment, a person) through the memory of taste, offering an experience that is both personal and universal.

We will also be showing a series of graphite drawings on wood or paper by artist Lucile Soussan. Describing herself as a “hunter-gatherer of images”, Lucile Soussan builds her practice on photographic shots. Passionate about science, and more specifically botany and tropical forest ecosystems, Lucile Soussan moved to Reunion Island in the summer of 2022 to pursue her research (after Borneo Island in Asia and the Amazon rainforest in Peru). There, she works with the scientific community, both at sea and on land, to learn about conservation issues on a local scale, keen to anchor her work in a tangible reality. The resulting drawings poetically “paint” a primitive ecosystem that carries with it the earth's memory.

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Images : Rosa Maria Unda Souki, El recibidor de guayabas (The guava starter), 2025, watercolor, gouache and colored pencil on Arches paper, 31 × 41 cm. © Rosa Maria Unda Souki, courtesy Dilecta.

Lucile Soussan, Kaléidoscope I, 2023, graphite drawing on coated wood, 125 × 83 cm. © Lucile Soussan, courtesy Dilecta.