Hatchikian Gallery and the Art Production House Quai 36 are pleased to present the artist Vincent Abadie Hafez aka Zepha for an event exhibition titled Art Habité, which will be presented in two locations: at Quai 36 within the new cultural hub of the Fiminco Foundation in Romainville, an artistic destination in the east of Paris, and at the Claridge Hotel on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Following the Carte Blanche exhibition with Yann L’Outsider, Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 continue their collaboration to highlight artists who combine mural interventions and studio work in a resolutely contemporary approach that blends the rebellious indiscipline of urban art with the pictorial research towards abstraction.
The work of Vincent Abadie Hafez is inspired by the aesthetics of calligraphic writing to create a singular visual language that honors the memory source of the text, a way to convey the writing of humanity’s narrative, while freely appropriating, through the vitality of lines, curves, shapes and colors, a hybridized graphic poetry that transcends cultures and actualizes the connection that binds us to the temporality of a common world.
Vincent Abadie Hafez uses various media: canvases, walls, «matrices» engraved on zinc that evoke the idea of a primordial universal, bas-reliefs, which he works in ink, spray paint, and acrylic, to create effects of volume and matter that give the written letters a particular dynamism, forming a visual dialogue between the civilizations.
At Quai 36 (Romainville), the Art Habité exhibition will be held in two parts, two sequences to explore different temporal references of the work. Art Habité Part 1 will take place throughout the summer from June 18 to September 3 and will present a series of works that the artist has imagined as imprints of a long time, the one in which, in the purity of abstraction, the writing of origins stretches to the future to be invented, weaving a narrative of the transmission enriched by the creative indiscipline.
During the opening on June 18, Vincent Abadie Hafez will perform a performance that will initiate a collective and participatory work that will be marked by the intervention of each participant, playing with the dialectic between the visible and the invisible of the letters that fade away and reappear like a palimpsest.
The Art Habité exhibition will be presented in a setting parallel to the Hôtel Claridge starting June 23. Vincent Abadie Hafez will draw inspiration from the history of this emblematic hotel on the Champs-Élysées, a witness to the movements of Parisian artistic life throughout the 20th century whose walls echo the voices of the icons of literature, music, or cinema who left their mark. The works on display, of smaller format, will find their place in the architecture and design elements of the art deco style of the venue – whose façades and roof are listed as historical monuments – with sober and refined compositions that play with effects of transparency and color variations around a single nuance, always in the spirit of stylized calligraphy paying homage to the mythical text, which the artist imagines in the manner of a brush dance. Art Habité au Claridge will be unveiled during the vernissage on June 23 with an inaugural performance by the artist, an opportunity to experience the resonance between his work and the uniqueness of the venue.
At a time when language is being codified and tends to become functional, the calligraphic poetry of Vincent Abadie Hafez, from which visual words flow, is exhilarating in its multiple meanings, ambiguities, nuances, and graphic beauty that promises to be a resistance based on what the common roots that inhabit us offer us of freedom: the art of inhabiting the world.
Image gallery
