Fouad Bouchoucha — Mes Possibles — Eric Dupont Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 15, 2012 → January 15, 2013

For his first solo exhibition at Galerie Eric Dupont, Fouad Bouchoucha questions the Possibles of life through art, and tests these sensitive experiences.

The perception — mental, visual, physical or auditory — is at the heart of his work, and he uses the paramount element of a being, the idea of the here and now, the relationship to oneself and to the world. It is about becoming the object of vertiginous projections and accepting emotions such as complete and helpless frustration.

Try to formulate absence. Try to represent the acute. Try to feel full by emptiness. Try to exceed the limits of every possibility and to shape the intangible. Try to sculpt the potential, and methodically give reality to the irrational. Try to think of nothing, and to push your mind to its limit until there is only nonsense — because if we are nothing, we can always do everything.

Vanity? Perhaps. The piece Still Life, shows a bouquet of flowers which reminds us that the idea of reality can never be proven. In La Forme des Possibles, the white page convenes “demiurge”, which gives us the ability to see within an original matrix. In the prowess of Roni Colman, a champion but still a mere man, he subject flirts with fiction, and the sound of the loaded guns in Handing touches the inconsistency of our attempts at brave conquests yet to be completed. The 20,000 Hertz are a sort of allegory to the limits of true understanding.

The devices of Fouad Bouchoucha are formulated by the solution that induces forms by their own purpose: gestures, tools and materials that are used in his works are convened by their own nature, evoking or contradicting the original goal of the idea. Logic is pushed until the intrigue is too much: can what predominates us really not exist? Paradoxically, the image or the sound, like an object or the body, are totally absent. It is an excuse for the creation of a carnal texture, for the birth of new flaring ideas from a slippery ground. It is a sort of autopsy of how we may be influenced to perceive and conceive material — and how the artist exhibits the process, and the fantasy of mechanisms.

Diktat, all-powerful, a leader of a cult of performance and infiltrator of anomalies — this artist penetrates the cogs of construction of fictional collectives and confounded realities, to the point where “the visible and the sensitive round themselves”.¹ Malevitch was made an icon with a white square; Kandisky was devoted to translations of intangible phenomenons by lines and colours; De Maria invented the idea of strength and energy on an iron bar.

Here, resolutions are found and operated based on facts; schemes of representation and attempts of protection open limitless possibilities. To choreograph the generation of a white light, countered by fake reflections, new sovereign charters governing the construction of worlds “ex nihilo” are scanned. The way the event is orchestrated will testify if human powers are still unsuspected, and so will dismantle the old myths and legends, making space for the new Westerns.

Leïla Quillacq, November 2012

Avec le soutien du Centre national des arts plastiques (aide à la première exposition), ministère de la Culture et de la Communication

¹ Merlau Ponty, « Le visible et l’invisible »