Hijack city

Hardly anything is hung on the wall in the exhibition space. Three artists, three works, three different attitudes coexist there. It is also three commitments that meet there. Samir Laghouati-Rashwan has a political commitment, without question, in his plastic gestures. He reports on his investigations (history of colonization, economic history, prison conditions, police repression, etc.) and invokes the injustices that may be disturbing, in general he attacks the people who have power and do not share it. His daily life seems to be a fight against contempt and inconsideration, which he does not hesitate to highlight. Anita Molinero sculpts in danger, fire, plastic, the petrochemical industry, she is involved in a sculpture emergency, certainly by analogy with an emergency concerning the materials she is used to using and the violent deterioration that she operates on them. All the subtlety is surely in its own formula: “A dream for me, a nightmare for all”. In my opinion, Arnaud Vasseux practices a discreet, delicate and often extremely fragile sculpture. His work, like that of the other two, looks back on his time and is committed in a very secret way. It reveals the timelessness of human gesture, of the behavior of a material as a body, of optical desire and of the haptic gaze (the perception of the sense of touch by the projection of the body into its environment). Bringing together three artists makes it possible not to be tempted by a binary dialectic. Here, an assembled grid made of box spring modules seems to weigh above our heads (fragments of Dead Park, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, 2018-2021). There, a safety net used for scaffolding seems to be living its last moments (Untitled, Arnaud Vasseux, 2019). Further on, a dripping pile of plastic reminds us of those abandoned construction sites or motorways (Oyonnax (series), Anita Molinero, 2009). All these works reveal a sensitivity for these recurring elements in urban space, disposable, exchangeable, dirty, functional, elements often located at the zero level of our aesthetic hierarchy. Diverted with a degree of violence or gentleness relative to each artist, they become sculptural materials. Hijack City makes color and achrome coexist, the solid and the fragile, the heavy and the light, the rise and the subsidence, the shapeless and the geometric, the dirty and the clean. In the middle of the stairs, an installation module Dead Park by Samir Laghouati-Rashwan will inevitably get kicked by visitors, he is aware of it. At the end of the last room, a cast of a chair by Arnaud Vasseux would break if it fell, he apprehended it. In the middle of the exhibition spaces, do not get a sculpture by Anita Molinero in the foot, you are the one who is likely to suffer. The exhibition evokes this attraction of artists for the plastic qualities of the objects that surround them and that they divert. And their ability to take on new meaning when reworked through casting, modeling, assembly or installation. The exhibition summons a living history of sculpture by inviting three different generations of artists, producing a contemporary landscape of diverted objects.

Diego Bustamante 2021

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