From the 12th January to the 15th March 2017 the Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix presents its inaugural exhibition, showing Radouan Zeghidour’s Jian. Zeghidour’s work presents a reworking of traditional ideas of making and viewing, as many of his pieces are created in sites hidden from the public gaze, viewable only later when represented as trace, fragment or record. Zeghidour’s first solo show in England showcases his works encompassing a diverse range of media – all drawing on his abiding attraction to the dark and forgotten spaces of Paris, sensitively realised across the surfaces of metal, plaster, latex and found objects.
About the exhibition
This January artist Radouan Zeghidour presents his first solo show in England at the Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix gallery, offering visitors a remarkable encounter with the past and the present, with traces of what has been and an intimation of things that may never-yet-come-to be. His work presents a series of pieces that explore an archaeology of forgetting. His works are composed of memory, fragment and monument, created through sculptures that are at once forbidden discoveries made in subterranean spaces and fragmented remembering’s of past places that present a veiled, temporal encounter with forgotten spaces and objects as they intersect with our present.
Zeghidour said: “The title for the exhibition comes from a Chinese legendary bird, the Jian, which has only one wing, and only one eye. To be able to fly, he must find a companion, since it is only with two birds together, that they will have two wings, two eyes, and thus will be able to move. This legendary bird evokes a lot, love, the idea of the couple, the need to bond with others. But also, and this is what I see in relation to the exhibition here, something that […] represents the need for the present to feed on the past in order to be able to fly to the future.”
Radouan Zeghidour’s practice encompasses a diverse range of references and media - drawing on his attraction towards the dark and forgotten spaces of Paris. The sculptures made in these spaces are ephemeral, hidden installations, often built with the materials found on site. Many of his works are clandestine and illegal; destroyed every time they are found, and existing only as pictures, fragments, memories and video works. Mythological themes tie into his practice, which emerges from the underworld to the surface, different, changed and full of secrets. Building on these lost and hidden temporal works, Jian plays with the idea of ruins: the ruins of the past, the ruins of the present and the imaginary ruins of a future time. These works of imagined ruin, restored memory and archaeological (re)creation are constructed in various materials, from bas-reliefs, to monumental architectural sculptures evoking the doors, and structures of the subterranean, here constructed in polystyrene, polished aluminium, plaster and cement. The final works in the show are composed of found objects and fragile matter, arranged under a Clepsydra, so that they disappear from the gallery little by little; sculptures torn from dark spaces, slowly fading in the light – material dissolving into memory.
Keiko Rochaix, the gallerist and curator of Jian, says of Zeghidour’s works: “Grossly primitive and infinitely precious at the same time, his works are visually grasping, hitting the viewer at first sight. And that is before one digs into the conceptual sides of the body of his oeuvres; all the works are held together by almost enigmatic, other-worldly notions. Radouan's talent as a visual artist is that he recreates/produces unearthly ideas with such base, physical, tangible materials. And that is exactly what you see in Jian: the notion of ephemerality, somehow physically present in the space of the Gallery.”
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