Curated by Christian Alandete & Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin

For his first exhibition at Mennour, Sidival Fila presents a series of recent works in linen, cotton and/or silk stretched on a frame, dotted with old flowers looking like fragments from a Garden of Eden. On the Palatine Hill, overlooking Rome’s Colosseum, Brother Sidival divides his time between living as a Franciscan brother and working as an artist, paying homage to old paintings with a clever use of pleating, embroidery and patchwork.

Pieces of fabric left aside, abandoned, made shiny by the patina of time and kept in storerooms are given a new life in the hands of the artist who, in a meticulous work of sewing, magnifies the accidents that are printed on the surface of the canvases.

Between Arte Povera and Informal Art, Sidival Fila’s practice maps out its poetic and personal path in the wake of all those paintings without paint that operated outside the limits of the canvas. In 1410, a French artist had the original idea of painting a Madonna with angel on a linen canvas — as opposed to a wooden panel as done at the time — a process that was quickly adopted and popularised by many of his fellow Italian artists.