Le vent ne veut jamais rester dehors (The wind never wants to stay outside) will bring together his most recent works around a reflection on the mediatization of images and in the continuity of an experimentation of drawing as a privileged medium.
Massinissa Selmani's approach is as measured and discreet as plethoric and turbulent are the international political and social current events. Deployed in several forms, his drawings show a certain modesty and extreme simplicity. Nevertheless, they remain eloquent and poetic. Graphite, tracing paper and a few touches of colour are enough for the artist to dissect the dominant visual practices.
Massinissa Selmani most often proceeds with a selection of characters and motifs from different documental sources, mainly photographs or editorial cartoons. The elements taken are decontextualized and freely interpreted by the drawing, most of the time arranged in small sketches that punctuate here and there significant white areas. These left-empty spaces are a constant in the artist's work. His drawing is made up of absences, holes, lacks. The line is rarely pressed. The characters are frail, almost ghostly, giving the drawing a feeling of floating and uncertainty.
To enhance this fragile aspect, which refers to the precariousness of the images, the artist does not hesitate to make great use of tracing paper, often in fragments superimposed on the surface of the sheet in order to duplicate or blur an image (Spare time), sometimes in relief to suggest an architectural volume (Situations). Tracing paper assigns a new materiality to the drawing. In Souvenir du vide (Memory of the void), it even becomes its exclusive medium. Started in 2011, Souvenir du vide is a light structure that hosts a juxtaposition of forty-six paper and tracing paper cubes on which heterogeneous animations are projected. Inspired by news items or tragic events, the images that appear before our eyes are sometimes serious, sometimes funny or inaccessible. They mix different temporalities and opposite registers in the manner of the telescoping of topics in the media.
Tracing paper is also used as a projection screen in the Blue cloud animation where a floating blue cloud is close to the ground. Not far away, the animation Untitled, shown on a tablet, features a bearded character who, to get rid of invasive facial hair, simply removes his head. His gesture, absurd and comic, is repeated tirelessly.
If this absurd dimension takes its source in contemporary Algerian literature or in Paul Nougé's surrealist photography, it is mainly called upon in a work of defusing violence. Neutralizing, putting at a distance, to better think about images and events. This is the task to which Massinissa Selmani applies himself by creating situations that have very little chance of happening but which allow a familiarity to emerge due to an aesthetic vocabulary largely inspired by documentary and photojournalism.
In Au bord de l'autre mer (By the other sea), a man leaning against a wall takes off his shoe, without us knowing why. A little further to the left, a uniformed character draws an evanescent line with his fire extinguisher while two men in suits are clapping. The actions depicted here do not obey any logic. There is no link between the scenes except for the characters' gaze, which is always directed towards the invisible, towards an off-screen open to all kinds of speculations.
The off-screen question comes up a lot in the works of the artist who tries as much as possible to clear the boundaries of the frame enclosing the drawing. This is particularly evident in On the Roof, where the drawn parts extend beyond the frame, on a second sheet of paper fixed directly to the wall. The drawing always seems to extend and contaminate other spaces. It is open, constantly expanding. It is a drawing that reflects on its own limits, allegorically stated by the very frequent presence of walls, beams, railings and other lines in the composition.
Massinissa Selmani's work is also linked to architectural projects and their utopian essence. He often takes note of the gap between the initial concept and its ineffective, suspended, unfinished implementation. It is the vain action in contact with a complex and uncertain reality that interests the artist. In the series of drawings Soon, partially shown in the exhibition, advertising panels enhanced with pink, blue or yellow show fictitious drawings by architects that hold out the promise of vague modern housing projects. Underneath, a tiny character is vacuuming, holding up a sign without a message, trying to move a pole with a rope. In the end, all he does is stir up the wind.
A text by Fatma Cheffi
Translated by Narjes Torchani
