Galerie Claude Lemand

Zoulikha BOUABDELLAH, Le Sommeil (A Tribute to Gustave Courbet), 2016-2019. Red lac­quer on 8 papers, 160 x 280 cm. © Zoulikha Bouabdellah. Courtesy of Galerie Claude Lemand, Paris.

 Presentation by Anissa Bouayed

The art of Zoulikha Bouabdellah is a non-neu­tral way of talking about our world, of con­testing cer­tain aspects of it, of wanting to trans­form it - a trans­gres­sive art, whose inten­tion­ality can be found in works denouncing sit­u­a­tions long con­sid­ered as nor­ma­tive. , such as the ques­tion of gender or that of the place given to women in the dom­i­nant patri­ar­chal order.

Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s latest works bear wit­ness to a sus­tained atten­tion to works from the his­tory of European art in order to acti­vate them, to make them speak again, today, not of the past but of the pre­sent, by looking at them from cur­rent aes­thetic and polit­ical inten­tions. Not that the artist has aban­doned the other side of her cre­ation, which draws from her Muslim cul­ture the ele­ments that she remodels according to her cre­ative objec­tives. But she is working on the con­struc­tion of an exten­sive body of work, which tes­ti­fies in its very evo­lu­tion, in the mul­ti­plicity of cen­ters of interest and the broad­ening of themes, to a con­scious­ness on a world scale.

In Le Sommeil, the line fol­lows the curves of two bodies. The line is unfin­ished, sus­pended, its monochrome red color sends us back to blood, symbol of life and to the sen­sual red of carnal plea­sure, which the amorous pose of the two bodies knotted in sub­lime sleep, pre­serving this beau­tiful way of Courbet to evoke the female plea­sure and sap­phism in the rig­orous social con­text which was his.

Zoulikha spans the cen­turies to sig­nify that the issues of social con­trol over women are not yet resolved and sets up this frag­mented device that makes us men­tally remember the work cited in its entirety, while it only offers body parts, orga­nized around an empty center, which grips us as if in a ver­tigo and awakens in us a refusal of frag­men­ta­tion.