Visiting the solo exhibition, Harness the Sun, by Leyla Majeri, a young artist from Montreal, a colorful and joyful universe comes to us.

It’s an imaginary landscape presenting smiling abstract figures, irregular shapes and mysterious forms, in paper or plastic. The works suggest an ambiguous world relating to the natural forces to the cosmos and to Earth’s cycles.

Leyla is a gardener, co-designing a landscape. She works with simple materials in their basic states.
Her practice developed primarily in printmaking (poster, zines, artist’s books) and expanded into experimental animation film. Her work is a reflexion on the ecological link between nature and imagination.

The nature of her shapes, in their simplicity and subtlety, are not self-evident. As her collaborator Katherine Kline said “The smiling faces, a signature in Leylaâ€s work, are both an expression of the artist, and a gesture toward what lies beyond the artist.”

In her exhibition at Arprim Gallery, Leyla creates a vibrant space where the floating figures dialogue with each other. These figures can be natural and supernatural beings at once.
Despite the seemingly non-objective nature of the work, Leyla Majeri maintained many features inspired by living beings. She models visual elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms. As the artist Joan Miró explained in 1948, “for me a form is never something abstract; it is always a sign of something”.

Leyla Majeri’s landscape appear in continuous transformation, as if figures took a new shapes, or energies or other properties converted into different forms.
The installation surprises the wandering viewer looking for details or connections attempting to decipher a final meaning. Two eyes, a smile and a question displayed on the floor: “Why do I get so sensitive?”.
Color spots on the wall or writings on the floor remind the viewer that a party or a mysterious phenomena has just happened or could happen. No one answers. The ambiguity is left there, hanging.

Eleonora Milner