Protean, the art of Yazid Oulab brings together sculpture, drawing, painting, installation or object as many means of replaying ancestral gestures, at the forefront of which, is the scriptural gesture. For this exhibition, the artist presents new graphic works as well as metal and marble objects and sculptures developed around his research on cuneiform writing.
Developed in Lower Mesopotamia during the 4th millennium BC, the cuneiform, considered to be the first form of writing known to mankind, uses wedge-shaped signs and triangular nails engraved with a beveled instrument. Yazid Oulab's recent work is the result of a long series of experiments exploring the nail as an element that assembles, or in consideration of the Alif materialising the divine force. In this project, he returns to the very origin of this form; to its matrix.
The artist's interest in cuneiform writing is twofold. First of all, there is its physical aspect, sculptural, linked to the plastic possibilities of its original support. Mesopotamian scribes engraved fresh clay which, once hardened, preserved the trace, the imprint. This imprint in the thickness of the material is what holds the artist's attention as we witness the blossoming of a form in volume, an angular shape that will inspire the corner sculptures of Yazid Oulab. "The invention of writing was above all the construction of a new logic of space "¹ reminds us Isabelle Klock- Fontanille, a specialist in the history and the semiology of writing.
The appearance and evolution of the cuneiform are inseparable from the history of mathematics, which also fascinates the artist. "It's the only writing where letters and numbers look alike," notes Yazid Oulab. Consider, for example, the Plimpton 322 cuneiform tablet discovered in the early 1900s in southern Iraq and identified as the oldest trigonometric table. Even if the interpretation of this tablet remains very controversial today as to its vocation (pedagogical or presentation of solutions to an arithmetical problem), the fact remains that a practical thought was carried out at the time in the matter and ensured its transmission.
All of Yazid Oulab's artworks revolve around the idea of a thought that is being constructed, a desire to inform the world and its objects. To do this, they never stop unfolding the archaic forms in an attempt to make the tool of work interact with the tool of thought and writing.
1.Isabelle Klock-Fontanille, « Des supports pour écrire d'Uruk à Internet », Le français aujourd'hui 2010/3 (n°
170), p. 13-30.