le calme de l’idée fixe
The exhibition brings together some twenty artworks designed since 2013, with new productions demonstrating the artist’s current lines of thinking, in which topography and architecture in particular have gained heightened prominence. The background has always had a key role to play in Massinissa Selmani’s realistic sketches: whether intentionally absent, presented out of context or given a new composition, it adds to the absurdity of the situations and characters with inscrutable intentions. These spatial elements gradually break away from these narratives to become a subject in their own right. They embody fictional spaces – possible locations where our imaginations can roam free.
A major series of drawings chimes with one particular installation that has been designed especially for the exhibition: a table/scale model rises out of the darkness to form a mini laboratory churning out images, projects and outlined forms.
At once a drafting table, architectural model or mapping tool, it also becomes a projection device for animated drawings shown on the surrounding screens. This experimentation unit models a mini make-believe place which can be connected in myriad ways – whether by echoes, reverberation or dissemination – to the fictional architecture and spaces woven into Massinissa Selmani’s drawings.
massinissa selmani
The artist was born in 1980 in Algiers, Algeria. He lives and works in Tours.
Drawing is Massinissa Selamni’s experimental field; Regardless of the multiple mediums he uses, all his works are anchored in the current political and social issues. He collects press clippings and images from the media that he reinterprets and transforms by mixing them together; the scenes draw inspiration from the documentary genre, presenting a similar narrative and mise en scène.
Massinissa Selmani focuses on the collision of these contradictory sources to further emphasise the idea that news are fabricated. By deconstructing an image’s ambiguity, drawing allows him to create a certain distance between its immediacy and its proliferation.
Massinissa Selmani’s work is tinged with surrealism. He extracts and juxtaposes incompatible elements from various images, creating little stories that become part of history. Stories that are believable, although far from probable. Between tragic and comic, ferocity and delicacy, the absurd is always present. Incidents are too, as they always seem to be at the centre of the situations imagined by the artist.
For Massinissa Selmani, the white canvas is just as important as the drawing itself, as the empty spaces it creates allow the viewer’s imagination, memory and perception to do the work of interpretation.
The exhibition brings together some twenty artworks designed since 2013, with new productions demonstrating the artist’s current lines of thinking, in which topography and architecture in particular have gained heightened prominence. The background has always had a key role to play in Massinissa Selmani’s realistic sketches: whether intentionally absent, presented out of context or given a new composition, it adds to the absurdity of the situations and characters with inscrutable intentions. These spatial elements gradually break away from these narratives to become a subject in their own right. They embody fictional spaces – possible locations where our imaginations can roam free.
A major series of drawings chimes with one particular installation that has been designed especially for the exhibition: a table/scale model rises out of the darkness to form a mini laboratory churning out images, projects and outlined forms.
At once a drafting table, architectural model or mapping tool, it also becomes a projection device for animated drawings shown on the surrounding screens. This experimentation unit models a mini make-believe place which can be connected in myriad ways – whether by echoes, reverberation or dissemination – to the fictional architecture and spaces woven into Massinissa Selmani’s drawings.
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