YANIS KHANNOUSSI

Khannoussi (b. 1996, France) approaches sculpture as a painter. Working with industrial materials drawn from the automotive and aerospace industries (fiberglass, automotive spray paint, polished varnishes) he produces flawless, iridescent volumes that shift in color as the viewer moves around them. His practice belongs to the lineage of California Finish Fetish, but reverses its logic: where industrial finishes today can be rendered effortlessly by software and automation, Khannoussi insists on the hand as the final tool, where flawlessness is the opposite of automation— a trace patient enough to erase itself.

The exhibition takes its title from the Peacock Mantis, a creature whose sixteen color receptors allow it to perceive a spectrum of light entirely invisible to the human eye. It is this impossible palette that Khannoussi reaches for in his infinite gradients of color. Khannoussi uses the mantis as a conceptual anchor, a reminder that reality is dictated by the limits of perception. His new body of work centers on the ellipse: a “perfect imperfection,” the alienated iteration of the sphere, born from the artist’s reversal of industrial making. Forms originate in the frictionless realm of 3D modeling and rely on the human hand as their final vessel, pulling digital weightlessness into the heavy material world. Rooted in the personal grief following the loss of his father, the works function as physical borders for a void: surfaces that hold absence, and trace the outer edge of the visible.