calendario eventi  :: 

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30/10/2015

Abdeljalil Saouli

Voice Gallery, Marrakech

Voice Gallery is pleased to invite you on Friday 30ty 2015, to the opening of Hybridations , the first solo show of the artist Abdeljalil Saouli.

“Man's sublime function is literally and positively that of a new earthly Creator. His duty is to make all things what they ought to bec o me. Not merely in the matter of the cultivation of the soil of our earth, but also as regards intell ectual and moral culture justice, love, science, arts, trade and manufactures " no consummation nor true conclusion is possible save through Man, to whom creation was con fided that he might till it - ut operatur terram - as the old text of the Book of Genesis runs.” Charles Gounod , Me moirs of an Artist (1896).

It may be that iconoclastic vision is also an opportunity to give back to the image - which is a Weltanschauung "world view" - the power to leave the inertia of its initial state (as a sign or as doxa) to try the great adventure of aesthetic experience (which is invention of meaning and search for the essence). In his "constructive" approach, Abdeljalil Saouli breaks the visual cortex of the object shoving the usual epiphany of "things" or their functionality and conformity to reality which they have been extirpated, for we offer as sediments an experience that is like "art objects". In this sense, the work of Saouli calls us to what Walter Benjamin called a "visual u nconscious" and therefore to our ability, sometimes oneiric, imaginative and interpretative.

Body: animate / inanimate / animal, mobile / static / fluctuating composed / decomposed / re - composed, constructed / deconstructed / reconstructed.... a continuous movement animates these "objects" of static appearance; a self - traction tacit making objects living and mythical at the same time. Living in the sense that Saouli works on natural materials (wood, grass paste, raw metals, etc.), mythical because it holds strong symbolic weight ( bullet s, bats, flowers, fossils ...)

n his exhibition " Hybridizations " Abdeljalil Saouli refines a theme that is clean and that made his uniqueness as an artist; to know the secret links that may exist between a natural material ( the material) and a work of art (the industrial process or the Teknè). Through a series of approaches, variations around a theme (herein that of death being part of life), the artist poses the crucial question "what is a Becoming in a proteiform world (a w orld in constant mutation)? "He questions not only the forms and their core creation , but especially their immutable principle, their essence. This is the definition that Kant gives to art as a unit "between forma and materia" (between form and matter). Ephemeral aspects of things are as well as Maya's veils behind which something more important and more fundamental is taking place.

"Death: Caged by nothingness, hiding from being" wrote Martin Heidegger. The epiphany of being in existence is conditioned b y the withdrawal of being in the dying.

The new exhibition of Abdeljalil Saouli, on the picture rails of the Voice Gallery in Marrakech, retraces the itinerary of a research at a time metaphysical and technical, a research featuring an obsessive process fr om repetition up to variation (as in a natural process), multiplying the forms, metaphor after metaphor, to the point where the latter eventually dissolve s into the unity of meaning. With irony and cynicism, with astonishment, the panoptic approach of the artist allows him to keep vis - a - vis distance from the carved or molded object , capable of reproducing the initial shock, ekstatic where the objectal show continues in this gray zone , this translucent but impassible border between the phenomenal and the nou menal, between the Epiphany and unfathomable principle, between a being and being. The approach is the one Pascal Quignard described in his Rhétorique speculative ( speculative rhetoric ) : "He (the rhetorician) shows. But what it shows is the open window." Thus, they are the Hybridizations of A. Saouli; "objects" he shows us are not "answers" but the ingredients of the Question.

Winged bullet s, bat wings in the form of flowers, fossilized wings ... winged arms (or perhaps the armed wings) ... "strange" objects, of a primitive strangeness bordering on omen, which set free our ancient fears, our primitive anxieties ... But also objects of conspiracy, totemic objects in the original sense of t he term recalling the childhood of man, his gropings in a virgin world, in discover, and that is frightening. "The discovery": this is the word that was common to the first man, the child and the artist. If "discover ing" is serious; that which is probably more serious is the way to access them which is none other than the game, the fun of the game, the agonizing pleasure of the game. The artist is this “discoverer " playful but whose game consists of a continuous research, unbroken; a widening which seeks "r acial sitting" of things, the immutable principle of the world, now this is the righteous that falls on the other side of reality, the scary sid e, enigma par excelence : death.

The series " Hybridizations " relates not death but the dying, not the finitude b ut the transformation. Abdeljalil Saouli instrumentalises the strangeness of intermediate states between "to - be", "being" and "to die." The hybrid object, in its strangeness, is a fluidization which print s the very sharp edges between the components of a s ingle truth: "Having to be, it is also having to die." according to Heidegger's formula. The symbolism of the alloying object, in its very prolixity is a continuum. The symbolic creature, even if mythical (in this case the bat) is both a mammal and a flyin g viviparous predator. Like humans, it is an animal that is capable of living independently, even before being born. This mammal symbolizes the human in all its complexity; a blind animal guided by the echo of his own voice, he prefigures the almost blind movement of man in his destiny, this narcissistic pilgrimage in an almost dreamlike reality articulated projects, in anticipation, but in an uncertain manner, where only the blind fate is decides.

A “ living ” is primarily and essentially a “ dying ”. A s a bullet , its path always ends in the heart of the same target; death. Living is to go blindly to the ultimatum, but in the meantime there are the soaring, the flying, the dream, the fantasy, sundry achievements ... be it the fleeting trajectory of the bulle t fired by pressing the trigger until the final explosion and the achievement of the target, where everything disappears, where it remains only a fossil imprint, itself crumbling and disappearing over time. Abdeljalil Saouli questions time in the Aristotel ian form: "Time is the number of the movement”. The movement here being frozen, it also freezes the time to offer to the public speculation as complete form, and as a compendium. The visible object (or visual), while being there is not virtually invisible since the process continues to live it, to work it, and to carve it; so it is not out of time (like a dead object), but also under the influence of time, undergoing work, disintegrating, transforming, and weathering (that is to say, etymologically, becomi ng another "Alter").

In this exhibition, Abdeljalil Saouli traces the route of the living in the uninterrupted flow of time. This is the path of the bullet (which is that of a viviparous) since its initial inertia in the gun barrel or the revolver to final inertia of the fossil (the empty cartridge after detonation) from time zero, from conception and birth to death; the decomposition and liquefaction not in anything, but in the everything of the Cosmos. The artist's technique and materials are also the art ificial vision and conception of the world and of art.

Saouli is not satisfied to neither "reproduce" the real nor to sublimate in conventional aesthetic forms, but forces it to deliver its own "signitive" codes. By extracting parcels of this reality and h ighlighting them; the artist enhances the acuity, amplifies the significance. Earth, grass pulp, wood, animal remains, bronze ... all these materials are alive and even continue to be deprived from their useful value. These are organizations in the element al state and therefore inherently natural to thank the intrinsic energy that animates all things: chemical, biological processes, and environmental actions of abrasive or corrosive elements. This matter, as well as the living that we are, is subject to the same laws by which death is no longer considered as a rite of passage from one state to another; and is the best guarantee we have that we are all part of what Maurice Merleau - Ponty calls in his theory of perception "the flesh of the world". Matters to wh ich the artist leaves his trace, that refines the forge of his creative flame without being identified by concepts or generic and conventional formulas. This material, shaped, molded, kneaded.... continues its adventure; it is oxidized, decomposed, demater ialized. Then, this is a way of denying death, seeing in it another form of living in a world where, inevitably, nothing dies, nothing is lost but everything is transformed

Text and conversation with the artist by Hicham Benchrif

Voice Gallery
366, Z.I. Sidi Ghanem | 40000 Marrakech | Maroc

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