Abel Techer — À propos — Slash Paris

In his painting, drawing, photography and sculpture, Abel Techer embodies gender performativity, as theorized by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990). In 2015, he produced a new self-portrait. It is an untitled work in which the artist represents himself bare-chested, from a slightly 3⁄4 view. Staring directly at us, he pulls at and plumps up his breast. Hanging on the wall above and behind him are two woollen pompoms, the signs of a fragile masculinity. In the bottom left-hand corner of the composition, a pair of scissors, evoking snipping, castration, transition. We are offered several possible narratives, in which we are free to project ourselves. This work, presented at the Maëlle Galerie, is a plastic and political encounter with Abel Techer.

Five years have passed since. While Abel Techer continues an experimentation framed by questions of self-representation, auto-fiction and gender performativity, his recent works attest to a radicalization of his position concerning the refusal of a suffocating binarism. To determining and reassuring norms, Abel Techer prefers turmoil and a plurality of alternatives. Head shaved, the artist turns his body into an object, a plastic mannequin that he dresses, undresses, acces- sorizes and makes-up, over and over. The body is hairless, ageless, and uncontextualized. It is a body freed of a toxic identity to which we are all are meant to conform: assigned male or female from cradle to grave. It is a body staged in the depths of fantasies or phantasmagoria, the site of which is childhood. Soft toys, knickknacks, motifs and pastel colours point us to this territory in a permanent state of flux. A time of transition, of transformation, in which bodies are not yet completely normalized. A time of play, fears, dreams and becomings.

Abel Techer speaks of incomplete bodies: «The body, like representation, is in construction, or deconstruction. It’s a transitory state, a shifting platform.» The choice of an academic treatment stems from a desire for a place in a history of art until now written and constituted by the advocates of patriarchy. The classicism of the paintings and drawings is a plastic and political statement. Through it, and through a highly subversive gentleness, Abel Techer introduces insolence, joy, vulnerability, irony and impropriety. In so doing, he, in intaglio, signifies the exclusion of bodies deliberately side-lined by an overly authoritarian and malevolent history of art. In the wake of his elders, the artist is committed to an art conceived outside the norms and traditions. An absolutely queer art.

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Abel Techer was born in Réunion, where he lives and works today.

Techer trained at the Réunion Ecole Supérieure d’Art, where he obtained his DNSEP national arts diploma with honours in 2015. He also studied at the Alicante Escuela Superior de Arte y Diseño (EASDA) in Spain.

Techer’s work has notably been exhibited at the Biennale art nOmad (Arnac-la-Poste / Bourges / Paris / Calais / Brussels / Berlin, 2018), at the Centre d’art Transpalette (Bourges, 2018), at ZO Anima (Nîmes, 2017), at the FRAC Poitou-Charentes (Angoulême, 2017), at the Musée de Stella Matutina (Réunion, 2017), at the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean (Mauritius, 2017), at the Cité des Arts (Réunion, 2017), at the Maison consulaire (Mende, 2017), at the Ancien Hôtel de Ville, (Saint-Denis, Réunion, 2017), at the Musée Léon Dierx (2016, Réunion) and the FRAC Piton Saint-Leu (Réunion, 2015).
His works have been acquired by the Musée Léon Dierx, by the Frac Poitou-Charentes and the Frac Réunion