En torrent et second jour — Neil Beloufa — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 1 → May 24, 2014

Entretien — Neïl Beloufa Né en 1985, Neïl Beloufa, pour son nouveau solo show à la Fondation Ricard, entraîne le spectateur dans le jeu d’une exposition en train de se parfaire sous ses yeux, avant qu’il ne s’attelle prochainement à un film de science-fiction, un autre d’espionnage ou encore à la réalisation de grands dinosaures…

Neïl Beloufa’s video works do not so much deconstruct filmic conventions as they undo them, dismantling then reassembling the cinematic apparatus into new continuities. His characters inhabit precarious stages, meant to obstruct or artificially extend the movements of the camera, rather than accommodate narratives of transformation. Panning shots, dialogues, half-gestures, segmented or cloned scenographies fictionalize each other to a point of cinematic self-display: the artist’s counterpart for our expectation of a climactic moment, a methodical pursuit of what makes an artifice — on- or off-screen — an artifice. This logic of dismantling extends into the environments he constructs around his moving images — a montage of sculptural translations and unsteady equivalents, of material “stills” from a process not unlike his handling of video techniques and histories.

It is these installation correlates — Beloufa’s labyrinthine, frustrating “projection rooms”, or, seen differently, his unsettlingly palpable, sculptural making-of’s — whose syntax and role are reversed in the artist’s project for the Fondation Ricard. Never at ease with their status as props, these objects will be activated and documented, moved and movied, allowed to outgrow any clear distinctions of figure, ground and importance. Usurping a centre-stage position, their ambiguous place between functionality and obstruction is intensified and emphasized. The interface embodies and takes over the role of protagonist: the converse of a Pygmalion moment — where the pedestal would come alive –, or echo of modern anxieties about a conspiracy of screens, progressively encroaching upon the bodies and souls of viewers. Neïl Beloufa experiments with animation, with a lively hypertrophy of displays, with a sense of indistinction between frame and that which is framed. En torrent et second jour works through a messy notion of realism and mimesis, where figures and grounds, messages and interfaces camouflage each other. The mimetic equation — that held together films and the sculptural assemblages ostensibly made for their viewing — expands into another, abstract mimesis, that links unstable images and unclear users, competing for meaning and emptying each other of time.

— Mihnea Mircan, February 2014

Born in 1985 and a graduate of the Beaux-Arts school of Paris and Studio Le fresnoy, Neïl Beloufa is one is his generation’s most promising artists.He has been awarded both the Audi Talent Prize and the meurice Prize for Contemporary Art and has had solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and The New museum in New York.