NYAB Event - Radouan Zeghidour “HYPOGEA”

Radouan Zeghidour “HYPOGEA”

Catinca Tabacaru

[Image: Radouan Zeghidour, Detail of Reliques (2016) polished alumimium, pictures, engraving, and various materials.]

This event has ended.

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famous utterance could be Radouan Zeghidour’s motto. The 26 year-old Parisian artist’s practice has been characterized by the building and documenting of illicit installations in hidden locations, the routes to which are disclosed only after the works are removed. Subway tunnels, catacombs and abandoned warehouses around Paris have served as his canvases - effectively denying access to any audience except the few lucky enough to « discover » those thanks to serendipity. Radouan Zeghidour likes to think of strangers « hallucinating » his surreal and unexpected art installations through a subway window.

These underground structures, whether rafts, castle-like skeletons, or tombs are only revealed to a public audience after their life cycle, exhibited as recollections of the artist’s secrets: photographs capturing the sites, video works of the journey underground, paintings made with the debris or detritus from his locations, and boxes of relics.

Oscillating between ideas of secrecy and the sacred, the Zeghidour’s first New York solo exhibition presented at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery and curated by Marie Salomé Peyronnel, focuses on the memory of Désenchantement (i.e. Disenchantment), a structure made of wood, wax and whool he installed and de-installed under the La Maison Rouge Museum in Paris in 2015. The name ‘Hypogea’ refers to underground crypts, temples and tombs… the one he explores to expend his imagination and find peace as much as his own constructions.

“I explore undergrounds when I feel blue. It soothes me. Taking risks, trespassing and challenging myself imply to be extremely focused, on my moves as well as on any sound that could announce the presence of a security agent or a train arriving on the rails. My senses are awake, as if I was hunting, When you get back to day light and loose yourself again in the crowd, you carry this secret with you. A feeling that reminds me of the short story Secret Miracle by Jorge Luis Borges: a play writer is arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to die. A few minutes before being killed, time freezes for one year, which allows him to complete his last play. No one will ever know about this secret creation when the bullet hits his head. »

This exhibition includes six works: a box of relics made from polished aluminum and containing photographs and artifacts found on location while building Désenchantement; two debris paintings memorialized in wax; a video documenting the journey to the secret site; a hand drawn access map daring visitors to embark on a memorial pilgrimage to the once was installation; and an impressive tombstone drawn with acid on aluminum marking the end of the process. The name of the show ‘Hypogea’ refers to underground crypts, temples and tombs… the one he explores to expend his imagination and find peace as much as his own constructions.

In Hypogea, the Parisian kid only reveals incomplete pieces of a puzzle : “Something always has to be missing : the location or the installation itself. I leave room for imagination.” explains Zeghidour.

Born in 1989, Radouan Zeghidour lives and works in Paris, France. He won the 2014 Thaddaeus Ropac Award and was exhibited at Fondation Brownstone, at Eglise Saint-Denys and at Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève in Paris. His works have also been shown by Marie Salomé Peyronnel at the 2016 edition of SPRING/BREAK art show in New York last March.

Marie Salomé is a French independent writer, agent and curator based in Brooklyn. She came accross Radouan Zeghidour’s work while writing a piece on invisible art for Vanity Fair (France). He politely declined the interview but since then he became part of the crew of young foreigner artists she represents in the United States.