Artists

Achraf Touloub

Press release

Under an unceasing flow of images and, without restraint, neoliberal globalization forces to a permanent unveiling. What remains of the state aligned with large corporations constantly invites us to exhibitionism, which, under the guise of transparency, is merely one of the most refined forms of control.

A.T.'s first solo exhibition at Parliament, "Treatise of Metamorphosis" invites us to rethink the capacity of representation to be autonomous - which is only made possible by its ability to maintain a part of the invisible, which the observer cannot control.

The artworks presented here reflect the paradoxical and political practice of erasure, both individual and collective. Embracing this condition of perpetual motion, each work adopts the flows while generating their own survival tools. Doubling and the merging of forms are approached as an evasion of all predictability of global surveillance. A multiplication of complex interweavings, an encryption to better anonymize ourselves. Its ethereal compositions, appearing and disappearing at will, retain the ironic virtues of a form of escape.

In A.T’s works, no defined pictorial territory exists without an opposing double. Between blood and copper, each composition embodies the force of a flow that passes from one work to another, from one body to another. The fabric is only continually shifting; the motif is self-ornamentating, and no external gaze can fully capture its contours.

The path drawn in space – between staging and ritual – is that of metamorphosis: if the work is in constant transformation, it cannot be entirely grasped. Indeed, there is always an element of disappearance in transformation. Transformation is conceived as a tool for emancipation, and metamorphosis as a state of traversing, in a continuous between.

The escape plays reciprocally for the work and the observer: endowed with a difficult-to-absorb occult aspect, the viewer can only meet the work. In return, a facilitated link is established for the viewer's own disappearance, understood as a new way of existing within the works. The exhibition thus becomes the precursor to the ritual of collective disappearance.

At the back of the second exhibition room, Galion, referencing the now demolished bar of the Galion d'Aulnay sous Bois, unfolds like a long collective portrait. Nylon and canvas reveal a weave and a motif from touches of ivory black, or the excess of material oozes the play of sutures and cuts, now the drawing and the sculpture. In this remaining synthetic skin lie the intimate traces of an ongoing transformation. In the crevices of the material, one can recognize the figures on the horizon, which have (re)united around the Galion.

With the support of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques