Massinissa Selmani’s (CRF 2021) solo exhibition Après l’ordinaire is currently up at Été 78 in Brussels and will be available until December 17th, 2022. Learn more here.
“In Massinissa Selmani’s aesthetic, the gravity of the subjects is carried by the simplest means, imbued with a strange lightness, like an elusive latent threat. His experimental approach to drawing consists of composing sequences, or windows, from isolated elements revealing contradictions and impossible situations, which he stages through drawing, collage, installation, animation or the sculpture. The artist likes to bring together fragments to create timeless spaces, far from any physical or practical reality, full of humor and absurdity.
Massinissa Selmani isolates certain significant events to better reveal their meaning and remove them from the grip of time. His work is organized from a selection of images from the press, or more recently taken from his own imagination rooted in reality. By focusing on the details, he recomposes everything with an economy of forms at the heart of his aesthetic. The detail plays a matrix role referring to a larger whole loaded with multiple connotations. These fragments, sometimes tiny, seem to contain a whole world, latent and on borrowed time. This evocative power is due to its power of condensation: personal memory and historical reference, future and past, wonder and presentiment of catastrophe are closely intertwined.
Massinissa Selmani can thus escape the grip of time by organizing his compositions around recurring details which are so many structuring motifs. In this way, he conceives his works as a flow, where each work is linked to the others by this common iconography. We find impossible architectures, borders and lines, or even trees or animals that leave so many clues to the absurdity of the world. Claiming his attachment to the Belgian surrealists, including Paul Nougé in particular, he conceives his works as a poetic repertoire, mixing reflections on control and exclusion, distance and proximity, freedom and violence.”
