After inaugurating the gallery two years ago with her show Mirage, the French-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah lands again in Madrid with the exhibition Bizarre. An exhibition that goes through the relationship between beauty and strangeness, and that will not leave anyone indifferent.
"The beautiful is always strange. Contains always something strange, of unwanted, of unconscious", wrote Baudelaire. "Sleep is the form in which every living creature has the right to genius, their rare imaginations" added Cocteau. The beauty and the dream, the living and the unconscious, the familiar and the disturbing ... these are the variations and points of departure around which the exhibition Bizarre is developed.
The strange possesses in a natural way a space of choice. At the same time similarity and dissimilarity, in us and out of us, it compromises us, implies us. It allows us to ponder like the French sculptor Camille Claudel, sailing from the familiar to the strange, because it is only in the strange when we face the reality. On the other hand, do not we say that the truth is always stranger than the fiction?
The rare is first of all a matter of symbols and contrasts. And what contrast more surprising than that of the piece Les Couteaux (The Knives), long cleavers with vegetable forms, alloys of knife and of flower, where one shaves and cuts while the other grows and gets longer? The restlessness appears in the edge of these plants, where the act of death becomes an integrant part of the act of life. Definitively, the existence hangs only of a thread ...
Of deceptive appearances, Mauvaise graine (Bad Seed) is an ode to breaking of rules. Emerging out of sterile concrete and obeying its nature in detriment of the codes and the sacraments, some flowers are thrown to life. They force the ordinary, are they are where they are not expected. And do not revolutions born from disobedience?
Founding myth, symbol of freedom, of the soul or feminine sexuality, the spider is a creature full of many ways. Protection of Louise Bourgeois (The Mother), his image this time directed to the architecture of the social body. L_'Araignée (The Spider)_ is a composition, an assembly of arcs inspired by the Eastern traditions. Perched but not fixed, this body inspires a feeling that oscillates between curiosity and fear, in the confusion of a fragile world whose possibilities are endless.
This confusion is also the root of a series of drawings in black lacquer, entitled Les hybrides (Hybrids). Here, the contours of a cathedral are grafted to a mosque and giving birth to a mutant form, machine or insect, whose nature and intentions are also impossible to guess.
Directly inspired eponymous sculpture by Eugène Thivier, Cauchemar (Nightmare) continues the series initiated by the artist around the representacóin of women in Western Art. While Thivier shows women lying, experiencing a dreamlike delirium and being attacked by a monstrous gargoyle perched on her hip, Bouabdellah favors a feminist approach by drawing the outline of the sculpture with red nail lacquer, a material that evokes the shallowness of the cosmetic and the implicit drama in its appearance of blood, whose drips cause an ambivalent feeling aroused by the explosion of violence.
Continuing her series of works in 2009 around the nineteenth-century artist Dominique Ingres, Zoulikha Bouabdellah uses this time the female body to develop a new series entitled Corps étranges (Strange bodies). Using collage, the artist reproduces the shapes of famous odalisques. Each slave is washed away in favor of a mass of female body parts. Blurred, the result is an attempt of synthesis between the visible and the hidden, the appearance and disappearance. In the end there remains only an image, always the same: that of a woman submissive and silent.
Along the exhibition, which transports us from the vegetable to the animal and from the woman to the machine, Zoulikha Bouabdellah's work underlines how much of the imaginary is reality, how much of the bizarre is. The symbols and the signs are an essential component of ourselves and of our history.
Press release courtesy Sabrina Amrani.
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