An exhibition with multiple sequences to appreciate the work of Vincent Abadie Hafez.
Hatchikian Gallery renews its collaboration with the art production house Quai 36 to present the work of Vincent Abadie Hafez aka Zepha in two different venues, with two different scenographies and two perspectives on the artist’s work. The exhibition titled Art Habité will take place at Quai 36 within the new cultural hub around the Fiminco Foundation in Romainville, which is now establishing itself as a new artistic destination for the eastern part of Paris, and at Claridge, a mythical hotel that has witnessed the movements of Parisian artistic life in the 20th century.
A work nourished by memory sources, between homage and creative indiscipline.
The work of Vincent Abadie Hafez, from urban art to installations and canvases in his studio, is deeply nourished by travels, cosmopolitan discoveries, and artistic affinities in search of the sources of a universal aesthetic language that places us in a common world. Zepha first experimented with the creative vandalism of the graffiti group GAP before asserting the uniqueness of her graphic work in the studio, without, however, giving up mural interventions in Europe and the Middle East, which remain for her the opportunity for valuable exchanges and fruitful encounters. Thus, her practice has enriched itself with the know-how and teachings of the ancestral art of calligraphy. From calligraphy to graffiti, for the artist there is a continuity of visual language that conveys the writing of the story of civilization, while renewing itself with unconstrained and singular contributions. His encounters with the Moroccan calligrapher Abdelatif Moustad, the Sudanese artist Ahmed Abdel Aal, and the Iraqi artist Hassan Massoudy deeply influenced the evolution of his work towards the stylized representation of text as an essential element of his abstract compositions.
Calligraphy is a major inspiration.
The work of Vincent Abadie Hafez explores what connects us across cultures; this narrative, transmitted from the memory source, is enriched by intermingling and becomes ever more contemporary and creative. His artistic approach is driven by an interest in the ancient civilizations as memories of humanity: he draws inspiration from the scope of the written calligraphy and its infinite possibilities of imagination to deploy a visual language that pays homage to the handwritten source while offering the unprecedented vitality of a defiant aesthetic. Vincent Abadie Hafez’s work is resolutely rebellious, while honoring what precedes us and giving us the consistency to deal with the otherness. This is a free and creative appropriation that inscribes the artist’s unique mark within the common roots, inviting us to consider our anchors not as encumbrances but as roots from which horizons open up. The circles and curves in Vincent Abadie Hafez’s graphic language are traces of the invisible links that weave and interweave humanity.
Esmeralda, 2019
Spray, acrylic and ink on canvas
94 x 84 cm
An Art that connects us.
«Art Habité» by Man and what transcends it, art as a universal language marked by the imprint of time, by the other and by oneself. «Art Habité» that invades space-time, like a game of composition between the full and the empty, coming from a gestural action that is both deliberate and instinctive, as if the artist’s original hand were guided by the implicit of everything that precedes it. «Art Habité» as a particular state of the artist in creative tension, in the gentle trance of a brush dance in whose movement he is both himself and another, outside time, as inhabited by a presence.
Waving III, 2019
Spray, acrylic and ink on canvas
120 x 80 cm
A presentation at Quai 36 within the Fiminco Foundation in Romainville.
At Quai 36 within the Fiminco Foundation in Romainville, a new artistic and cultural hub in the eastern part of Paris that is bustling with creative projects, the work of Vincent Abadie Hafez will be presented in two exhibition sequences.
Art Habité Part 1, from June 18 to September 3, will unveil works that explore the aesthetics of the calligraphic line, both as a sign and as a signifier, in refined lines and shapes in variations of subdued colors. Vincent Abadie Hafez combines a stylistic alphabet from which words flow, words that speak the language of poets, the language of metaphors, multiple senses, unanswered questions, nuances and ambiguities, a language whose iconoclastic graphic beauty announces resistance to the nomenclatural novlangue of a closed world. The artist uses various media: canvases, «matrices» engraved on zinc, bas-reliefs in wood, which he works on with ink, spray paint, and acrylic paint to create effects of volume and matter that give the calligraphic letters a particular relief and momentum, composing a visual dialogue that transcends languages and borders.
At the opening of this Part 1 on June 18, Vincent Abadie Hafez will be present for a performance and an exchange with the audience. He will create an in-situ participatory work, in the spirit of a palimpsest, as a game around the text that erases and reappears randomly depending on the intervention of each person, drawing an unpredictable poetry. A beautiful allegory of the transmission of narrative, of the testimony of text, of the written language, this common edifice to which everyone adds their unique trace. This collective work on a support prepared in advance by the artist will allow us to grasp the entire artistic scope of an approach that reinserts the long time into the flashing immediacy of creation, opening the dimension of a memory depth. A work that, through the aesthetics of the calligraphy of the poets’ language, connects this language that brings together at a time when functional and instrumental language excludes all human subjectivity.
Art Habité Part 2, which takes place from October 20, 2022 to January 5, 2023 at Espace Quai 36, will unveil works with a more pronounced density, whose temporal dimension is that of the instantaneity of graffiti. The calligraphic letters here draw the contours of an architecture of vertical lines, or silhouettes, between abstraction and stylized figures. The color radiates a luminosity that brings the artist back to the instinctive and vandalistic practice of graffiti, in the momentum of a compressed time. In the studio, Vincent Abadie Hafez often works in the evening in the darkness, with metallic paints that play with reflections and flashes of light. The work reveals itself as unpredictable at the first glimmers of daylight. At the vernissage, on October 20 from 18:00 to 21:00, the artist will be present for a meeting and exchange with the public.
Vincent Abadie Hafez invited to urban festivals in the fall of 2022.
Between the two Art Habité exhibitions, Zepha is this year among the artists invited to the festival. Urban Week Paris La Défense 2022. Since 2014, street culture has been celebrated on the forecourt of La Défense during these five days of festival with live street art, concerts and DJ sets, urban sports and skate events, a market of creators and food trucks. The 2022 artistic itinerary is conceived in partnership with Quai 36: Twelve French and international artists (including Pichiavo, Pref, Add Fuel, Vincent Abadie Hafez aka Zepha, Mina Hamada x Zosen) are investing various festival spaces in different artistic forms: sculpture, aerial installation, monumental frescoes. Zepha is creating an in situ work and a performance in the style of a participatory live show – the spectators slide their hands inside an artistic device to be «tattooed» by the artist – using the jagua technique to create a letter composed of a handwritten text. Together, the participants are thus linked by a written document, witnesses to the transmission of civilization, which illustrates what language and art, by mediating access to the symbolic, weave into an humanity emancipated from the primitive realm of the instinctual.
Zepha is also present at the first Brussels street art festival, Racines Festival, which was inaugurated this year 2022, bringing together artists from all over the world for works and performances in situ on artistic routes that celebrate the human connection and the intertwined roots that underpin the world of graffiti.
The Art Habité exhibition is on display at Claridge.
Art Habité also features a second venue for Vincent Abadie Hafez’s exhibition and interventions starting June 14: the Claridge hotel on the Champs-Élysées, a mythical hotel that witnessed the artistic and intellectual life of Parisian society and was the home of icons of cinema, popular singers, jazz musicians and women, painters and writers. Since its opening after the First World War, the place has built its legend through the passage of a cosmopolitan clientele. The halls, reception rooms and winter garden have echoed the voices of Marlène Dietrich and Jean Gabin, Édith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Salvador Dalí and Georges Simenon, to name but a few. A revolving door of celebrities at this must-visit address on the most beautiful avenue in the world, in keeping with the radiance and aura of Paris. Vincent Abadie Hafez will draw inspiration from the echoes of Claridge, its Art Deco architecture, and its gold-colored ornamentation to propose a series of sober and refined works of geometric forms that play with transparencies and shades of color around a range that always maintains the spirit of stylized calligraphy. The artist sometimes hides texts, excerpts from timeless writings or from literary and artistic heritage in his graphic compositions. To curious viewers who approach the work as a mystery to be explored, the words of a phrase from one of the figures that have crossed the history of Claridge may appear. The title of the exhibition Art Habité takes on full meaning here, as the artist invades the space by honoring the mythical story of an emblematic hotel in Parisian life. Art Habité au Claridge will open with a performance by the artist during the opening on June 23, a privileged moment to discover his work and his way of ’living« the Claridge, to appreciate the resonance between the architecture of the place and the formal compositions conceived for the occasion.
A partnership between Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 to demystify the presentation of artists.
Following Carte Blanche at Yann L’Outsider, the inaugural exhibition of their partnership, Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 continue their collaboration with this new event around the work of Vincent Abadie Hafez. This collaboration between a gallerist and an art producer aims to offer artists exceptional exposure and the opportunity to develop new directions that reveal the full scope of their work and aesthetic vision. By deconstructing the exhibition space to extend it beyond the walls, making art accessible to all audiences, novice, amateur, collector, in order to evoke a strong collective bond woven of aesthetic marvels, it is an unprecedented visibility that is being offered to become a meeting point for the emerging art scene. The scenographies developed in partnership allow the visitor to explore the journey of an artist through the multiple paths of creation and the questions he/she faces in order to better contextualize the deployment of his/her work.
Sama, 2020
Acrylic and ink on canvas
193 x 202 cm
A work by Vincent Abadie Hafez has been added to the collections of the Mucem.
Mucem Marseille, in its spirit of contemporary agora, pursues an acquisition policy in order to enrich its collections of works related to popular arts concerning the Mediterranean region. The acquisition projects are presented to the collections committee by the members of the museum’s scientific team, examining the work’s aesthetic, historical, patrimonial or cultural interest. The works that receive a favorable opinion are then proposed to the acquisitions committee, composed of members of the Mucem administration as well as other institutions, including conservators and experts. Vincent Abadie Hafez’s work, highlighting the calligraphic aesthetics of the languages of the Mediterranean basin, has won over Mucem and an artwork created in a duo with the artist Johan Vasquez will thus enter the permanent collections of the emblematic museum of the Phocéan city, be included in the inventory and become inalienable. The two artists, who inaugurated a collaboration in Casablanca in 2013, have brought together their common inspirations, both sound and graphic, around the memory text. The ’Sound Writings« are participatory works, installations that combine research into musicality with calligraphic engraving on various media. The text is thus deployed in the graphic beauty and the sound of a language that is both written and spoken, as two inseparable modes of transmission. The work by Vincent Abadie Hafez and Johan Vasquez, which is being acquired by the Mucem, is titled Religare, which connects, and that is precisely the entire point of the artistic approach that characterizes their work. The work is presented as a mill of calligraphic prints made on zinc matrices that, when activated, trigger a vinyl disc that transcribes the recorded sounds. Everyone can interact with the device and modulate the sound effect. This acquisition by the Mucem is a beautiful recognition of the work undertaken and the humanist approach of Vincent Abadie Hafez and Johan Vasquez.
Vincent Abadie Hafez, a permanent artist in the Hatchikian Gallery collections.
Hatchikian Gallery counts Vincent Abadie Hafez among its permanent artists, and highlights the evolution of his work in the studio, inscribing the work within an aesthetic research that asserts itself and becomes unique through the encounters that nourish it. Hatchikian Gallery had presented the exhibition ConneXe in 2019, juxtaposing the typographic aesthetics of Yann L’Outsider and those – calligraphic – of the works of Vincent Abadie Hafez aka Zepha. The exhibition Art Habité will be a new way to discover or rediscover Vincent Abadie Hafez’s work and appreciate his oeuvre.
