عادل عبدالصمد
אדל אבדסמד
Адель Абдессемед

“Le Vase abominable”

source: lifeprooffr

Cet artiste d’origine algérienne, vivant depuis plusieurs années en France, est devenu une véritable star de l’art contemporain, grâce à des expositions importantes dans des institutions reconnues, telles que le Palais de Tokyo ou le Centre Pompidou, qui lui consacre une rétrospective jusqu’au 7 janvier 2013.

Ses œuvres sont l’occasion de réfléchir aux événements de l’actualité, comme dans le cas des voitures brûlées en Practice Zéro Tolerance (dont le titre fait allusion à l’expression de Sarkozy « Zéro tolerance » lors des émeutes des banlieues parisiennes en 2005) ou les avions entrelacées de Telle mère, telle fils. L’œuvre que vous voyez au début de cet article a comme titre Habibi, qui en arabe signifie « mon cher » : il s’agit probablement du portrait de l’artiste en forme d’énorme squelette « en vol », souvent installé au milieu d’une énorme salle, en lévitation dans l’espace.

L’impact visuel est grand : le squelette, qui fait toujours penser à la mort, et sa façon d’être exposée, comme les squelettes des dinosaures dans les musées d’histoire naturelle, polarisent l’attention des visiteurs, et tous les autres travaux à coté ont tendance à disparaître.

La tête de mort, les os humains, les squelettes sont des sujets classiques de l’iconographie chrétienne et notamment de la peinture hollandaise du XVIIème siècle. Elles renvoient toujours à l’idée de la mort et à la fragilité de la vie, dans des natures mortes qui s’appellent « vanités ».

La vanité d’Adel Abdessemed est une version moderne des peintures hollandaises : dans le sourire moqueur on y lit de l’ironie, dans la posture la volonté de bondir, de sauter au-delà de quelque chose, dans le réacteur d’avion, qui complète la composition et semble propulser le vol, l’allusion à une actualité dramatique bien connue.
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source: fireplacechatswordpress

Adel Abdessemed work seems to not only want to make naked the tragic and the terrible in the world, but to create and use the works as a kind of counter-force in opposition to and against the real. From his most recent work of making a barbed wire chair of a seat of power found in Westminster Abbey, to showcasing airplanes turned up like bananas, he seems to be saying that by doing what he is doing in art, he can be a certain type of master, he can create and or destroy or merely show acts of creation and/or destruction, just like life itself. Evidence of this is seen in his photograph where he appears to be on fire with his arms folded as if in an act of total defiance against the order and disorder of the world. How can I accept that his work is exclusively focused on the unreal realities of violence and sometimes blind human cruelty, perhaps he is seeking a cure to the impossible. Yet I myself have made the claim on multiple occasions that it is Literature than has changed human consciousness, and it is a higher art that is able to come into the world because of this heightened state of positive consciousness. What does this mean for the current production of Conceptual Art by fabrication and machine?What would happen if it were determined that yes, add more of these forms of images into the world, and the world will be made more whole or even completely whole, free of violence, full of love. Which would be that all human beings act at their highest levels of being, as versus sink into mindlessness madness without even a consideration of the effects on the world and all of time.
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source: artinfo

Adel’s Nightmares

Who really is Adel Abdessemed? He has been reclusive for the past several years, protecting himself behind a multitude of aesthetic and symbolic references. Indeed, his show is titled “Je Suis Innocent” (“I Am Innocent”), as if he were Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the violence of others. The subtext of this title could be, “The world, people, and art, are all brutal — not me,” suggesting that the violence of which he’s been accused of basing his work on (a show of animal snuff videos was even removed from the San Francisco Art Institute) came from somewhere else. Abdessemed is claiming to be just a passerby, a printing plate, a slightly distorting mirror.

In the artist’s work, the shock is first visual and unpredictable, like a well-placed headbutt or a left hook. At the Pompidou, snakes and frogs kill each other on camera (in “Usine” or “Factory,” from 2008); a piglet eagerly nurses at a woman’s breast (“Lise,” 2011); a nude and corpulent monk plays the flute (“Joueur de Flûte” or “Flute-Player,” 1996); stuffed foxes and rabbits, with their mouths gaping, form a massive relief sculpture (“Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” 2011-12); and an airplane is rolled up like a wrap (“Bourek,” 2005). There’s a certain baroque and stylized morbidity in all these works that evokes both Damien Hirst and Yan Fabre.

“Adel Abdessemed almost always dreams his artworks,” curator Philippe-Alain Michaud said at the Pompidou preview. These pieces primarily express the savagery of dreams rather than tackle politics or history, which only survive in bits and pieces after being chaotically assimilated by the sleeping artist.

Heavy-Duty Symbolism

Dreams are about disorder and incoherence. Why, then, do we find endless quotations and systematic references to Masaccio, Grünewald, Géricault, Goya, and Sol LeWitt in Abdessemed’s work? The references are so numerous that the work seems to hide behind them. And they’re so politically correct (from an art historical point of view) that the impact is much less sensational than would be expected from such a divisive artist.

In the end, what’s most troublesome about Abdessemed may be his way of playing with hype, copying it, and inflating it with references and a leaden symbolism that lacks the necessary distance for criticism. However, an undeniable impression of the artist’s poetic strength remains, glimpsed in certain works, especially in his sculpture of an immigrants’ boat filled with resin garbage bags and suspended in the air, like a flying carpet or Noah’s ark, a ghostly vessel or a tragic machine of the air. At such a moment, Abdessemed’s work still leaves us a little freedom to imagine and to explore.