Drawing Now 2022

In 3 jours de travail, Massinissa Selmani depicts an scene without decor, occupied by three characters with anonymised faces, emphasising their movement all the more. The uniform of one of them suggests a position of power in relation to the other two, reminiscent of the images of arrests that feed the news. However, the artist does not wish to refer to a specific situation, and inserts enigmatic elements, such as this long metal rod that keeps the distance or these cacti in place of the faces. These associations induce a disturbing strangeness, between comic absurdity and fright.

In Amorce dans l'air léger, Massinissa Selmani assembles elements to produce strange, even absurd situations, imbued with a certain gravity; they suggest signs of a latent tragedy or the beginnings of an elusive violence to come. The resulting storytelling, deliberately constructed from postures or fragments of architecture that seem familiar, escapes the possibility of situating or dating them. The elements thus isolated from their context tend to make the situations eternal.

In Amorce dans l'air léger, Massinissa Selmani assembles elements to produce strange, even absurd situations, imbued with a certain gravity; they suggest signs of a latent tragedy or the beginnings of an elusive violence to come. The resulting storytelling, deliberately constructed from postures or fragments of architecture that seem familiar, escapes the possibility of situating or dating them. The elements thus isolated from their context tend to make the situations eternal.

The Coques lourdes series is an opportunity for Massinissa Selmani to draw sceneries in which the characters represented seem to adopt postures of retreat and passivity. These situations evoke various forms of violence and threat which remain, as always with the artist, largely undetermined. Manipulating humour and gravity, Massinissa Selmani reveals a reality between poetry and politics.

Altérables is a long-term project that consists of creating a series of images with the same process: images recovered from newspapers are photocopied and then retouched by using one or more layers of transparent tracing paper. On each layer, a drawing comes duplicate, move or add an element or a contour of the original image. The transformed image is thus 'altered' and put into a different context, opening up the field of interpretation and diverting the original meaning of the source-image.

In Hadal, Maxime Verdier delivers a hijacked version of the traditional nude of classical art. The skin of the character lying on the bed is none other than the sea, whose waves mingle with the folds of the sheets. The title of the work refers to the deepest ocean depths where total darkness and crushing pressure reign. It is a body fainted and transported to another place, ready to dive into the abyss of itself as if to travel beyond the trap door that opens the exhibition.

Cosmic Dancer represents a character perched on stilts that serve as long views to explore the stratosphere. The title of the work is inspired by the most famous song of the rock band T.REX which marked the artist's adolescence and which he appropriates in his work. Maxime Verdier presents himself as an explorer traveling through unreal spaces. His plastic work allows him to extend his vision, to project himself beyond the limits.