Alma Feldhandler, "Who Is the Captain of All These Boys of Death?": Meyer Riegger, Berlin

15 March - 13 April 2024

"Archive fever is an irresistible fever to interpret traces, to give them meaning and to prefer one trace over another. Therefore, to prefer to forget is not only to prefer to keep. The archive […] is not a matter of the past, it's a matter of the future; a matter of love." (Jacques Derrida)
Alma Feldhandler's paintings harbour feelings that cannot be named without the risk of collapse. They are filled with wounded creatures, tattered existences and anxious forms that seem to be waiting in the corridors of time. The boy on his bed knows a thing or two about that. Above him, puppets perform a frightening dance, but this doesn't detract from the strange gentleness emanating from his convalescent body. Who's the captain of all these boys of death? Who commands these figures that pass through my body?
This raises the question of painting. The question of the nature, function and role of painting. Because it seems obvious to me that Alma Feldhandler's paintings and drawings are not simply the transposition of a phantom onto another surface using a different medium. There is something more secretive at play in the lines and colours; something that achieves, I believe, a genuine transmutation of the subjects represented. It is as if - using phantoms as a point of reference - Alma Feldhandler is not trying to rewrite these missing books but to rediscover their texture, their tonality, their unique way of resonating and being world-building worlds. There is something about her that almost resembles a (spiritual) medium, but in a gentle, silent way; she doesn't force anything, doesn't coerce anything, simply lets things happen. This explains why there is something oddly energising about the brilliance of Alma Feldhandler's work: as if painting, by virtue of its distinctive qualities, was able to use these phantoms to reach back to the actual reality of the scenes depicted.
But if I let myself drift off into my daydream, other things appear. I come to realise that the word phantom might not be correct or adequate. That perhaps other creatures, also resembling mediums, are there to remind us that those we believe to be dead are not; that from a quantum perspective, death is nonsense; that the slightest gesture, the slightest word, the slightest sensation exists in an eternal present that is also an eternal past and an eternal future; and that art, in this regard, is perhaps simply a way of honouring this, of practising time travel as obviously as we practise writing, sewing or dancing.
(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).
In this way, Alma Feldhandler collects these 'ultra-phantoms' of sorts - frail creatures signalling that something is missing from the shelves of this strange library, or to be more precise, that everything is missing, although not everything has actually disappeared. However, Alma's approach does not end with this act of collection, but rather finds its point of departure there. I imagine her walking through Berlin, wearing a heavy woollen coat with pockets full of phantoms. Strangely, these phantoms make her feel lighter, even though this lightness is lined with an ancient sadness. Affixed to the walls of her studio, they form a host of missing or lost creatures. The melancholy expressed here is not so much that of a painter succumbing to the ailments of phantoms as she moves from one archive to the next as it is that of the painted creatures themselves, who have come from afar to become part of our lives and help us transform the world. Alma Feldhandler's paintings do not document this aspiration, but rather re-enact it in their own way. That is why each canvas, each drawing, has the power to transport me to a world where colourful creatures, each going about their own business, conspire to realise the tenderest redemption. When faced with such emotions, how could you not feel completely helpless?
The more I think about this subject, the more the angel motif seems to symbolise this kind of quantum mediumship. Angels are not the intermediaries between humans and gods, because the world cannot be reduced to these entities. Rather, angels are the intermediaries between what is, what has been, what will be and, consequently, what could have been. Their role as intermediaries can be fulfilled in many ways. On the quantum level, temporal planes become entangled and entwined, so that past and future exist in the present, present and past in the future, present and future in the past, and so on. As intermediaries, the angels spread messages through these entangled temporal planes. In Hebrew, the word for angel is identical to that for messenger: mal'akh. The word tradition comes from the Latin traditio, tradere, from trans 'across' and dare 'give', and thus means 'to pass on to someone else, to hand over'. Exactly what angels do as messengers.
Tradition, like angels, is about passing something on. But every act of passage implies a transformation. Tradition is always a metamorphosis, and angels are always experts in this subject. Mutant, winged creatures, moving in cohorts towards better worlds. That's why, when I look at these painted figures, I feel a rustle of wings pass beneath my sternum.

You can find the full exhibition text by Romain Noël here.

Alma Feldhandler (born 1996 in Trappes, France) graduated with a BA from the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (2017) and postgraduated with a DNSEP from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris Cergy, Paris (2021). Her recent exhibitions are Mantel Mann (2023); The Rings of Saturn, (2023) and Mités (2022) at Galerie Derouillon, Paris.
- Alma Feldhandler, Who’s the Captain... Balcony, 2024

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies