Gallery selection: Philemona Williamson at Semiose

Painter Philemona Williamson 's second exhibition in Paris confirms the accuracy and singularity of her style. This time, the canvases are small-format, populated by children and adolescents. Situations, gestures, disproportions, expressions: everything is a little strange. A little black girl dressed as a maid—as the artist's mother was, employed by a wealthy white family in New York—sits in a wicker armchair, too large and high for her, as if on a throne she might be occupying illegally, if her gaze is to be believed. Two young girls, one naked, the other not, are perched on a branch where bluebirds of an unknown species welcome them. In each canvas, anomalies are revealed, and it sometimes seems that the surface is too small for the bodies the painter places there. She does not describe, does not narrate, but transforms the memory of her youth into fables. Only one is explicit: a young woman, dressed all in red, carries a banner above her head, attached to two sticks or canes. She embodies the revolt against racial segregation, which the artist, born in 1951, suffered throughout her youth. But the entire work is a declaration of freedom.