Précipités
Solo exhibition
Les Filles du Calvaire Gallery / Paris
May 4 - 16, 2012
Press release / pdf / English / Français
Exhibition booklet / pdf / English / Français
Exhbition text / English
Texte d'exposition / Français
Ismaïl Bahri organizes the advent of form, he creates arrangements for setting up the conditions of the event’s happening. The series of drawings Latency thus shows ink at the origin of this setting; on its own, it coagulates and becomes solidified on contact with air, forming on the surface of the glass a white circle on a ground that is detached from the black ground. These deposits then trace layers, regular and otherwise, which tally with the chronology of their hardening. Ismaïl Bahri’s artistic gesture goes beyond the mere creation of an image and grasps the form, the outcome of its existence and the time of its formation.
In this sense, if he plays with codes, he stays aloof from scientific requirement; once worked out, the experimental procedure becomes the work’s nerve centre. In the video Dénouement, he subordinates its slow progress to the execution of an invisible constraint, in the first instance, and contrary to all effectiveness. In knotting a thread stretching over several dozen yards, his limping silhouette approaches, condemned only.
Or how to once again emphasize the possibility for the infinitesimal to create the event. Whence the importance of propagation by capillarity in his method. With the series of photographs titled Sang d’encre/Blood of Ink, the skin becomes a constellation. Unlike paint, as a fantasy of mastery of colour on the surface, ink colonizes, it does not sink into its subject, it runs on top of it, gradually erases it, and marks it with the seal of absence. As an intimate “adhesion” of the materials that we find in his Films, the pieces of newspapers unfurl, by the mere force of the liquid, drawing a line which tears the darkness, as if pushed by a life of its own. From this noiseless unfurling there emerges a novel narrative where the meaning, no longer determined by the nature of the ensuing events, is subordinated to the time-frame of their “happening”.
Guillaume Benoit
