“Ody Saban draws with China ink on rag paper, practices aquarelle and painting (oil and acrylic). These sorts of embroideries with cold colors reminds of miniatures, but also the cosmopolite universe that reins in Turkey, and of which she is influenced.
Her drawings evoke the romantic erotism and every paper is full of the entanglement of bodies, faces, and flowers, also expressing the feminine fullness. If she identifies herself with Lilith, the cursed woman, it is to better fight the misogynist, but also to reveal the magic that emerges from her universe charged with a fantastic oneirism.
Since 1977, she has participated in more than 60 solo exhibitions and more than a hundred group exhibitions.” (T.M. in Ody Saban, Les jeux des lignes et de la volupté, 2009).
Born in Turkey and settled in Paris since 1977, the artist is especially attached to the notion of liberty: “I don’t think there are any between the two in our life: the human life seems to me to be built of moments that go either towards the voluntary or forced servitude, or towards liberty. There is a tragic dialectic between these two kinds of moments. All the great historical or mythical figures of freedom are taken in this dialectic (Isis and Osiris, Lilith, Prometheus, Gorgon, Jesus, Luficer, Heloise and Abelard, Thomas More, Thomas Müntzer… Louise Michel…).
Since the beginning of life in cities, the human race has almost always lived in societies where the substantial gain of a certain form of freedom is paid only by the loss of another freedom, rough, less complete, less beautiful, less fair, and which sometimes pays more cruelly. Power to stand morally right at a modest price, because this position that almost everyone had the opportunity to experience, at least a few times, is very nice! – but this price is not nothing.”
