Hatchikian Gallery and the Quai 36 Art Production House continue their collaboration to present the work of Vincent Abadie Hafez aka Zepha, whose work explores the aesthetic range of the written word in a singular visual language that honors the memory source of the text, a way of transmitting 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 bond that links us to the temporal dimension of a common world. The artist alternates interventions in public spaces at the invitation of institutions and festivals – he was recently present at Urban Week Paris La Défense for a monumental mural or at the Racines festival in Brussels – and work on canvases and other media in his studio. Mucem Marseille recently acquired one of its works, which will now be included in the museum’s collections.
A second phase of the event entitled Art Habité, the artist’s solo exhibition, opens this autumn with the unveiling of Part II, which can be seen from October 20, 2022 to January 5, 2023 at Espace Quai 36 within the new cultural hub of the Fondation Fiminco in Romainville, the artistic destination of the eastern part of Paris.
The first part of the Art Habité exhibition, which ended in September, featured a series of works that showcased the aesthetics of the calligraphic line, both as a sign and as a signifier, in lines and forms that were refined in subtle shades of subdued colors, and imbued with the long history of transmission enriched by the creative indiscipline.
For the second sequence of the exhibition, Art Habité Part II, Vincent Abadie Hafez worked with a different temporal reference: that of the flashiness of the compressed time of graffiti, with works on canvas with a more pronounced density, radiating energy from the color and the moving forms, especially around the circle that connects them. In this series, the calligraphies draw architectures of lines or silhouettes that emerge, between abstraction and stylized figures. At the opening on October 20 from 18:00 to 21:00 at Espace Quai 36, the artist will be present for a meeting and exchange.
At a time when language is being codified and tends to become functional, the calligraphic poetry of Vincent Abadie Hafez, from which the words of a visual dialogue flow, is exhilarating in a cosmopolitan universe of 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.
Hatchikian Gallery and Quai 36 are joining forces for a collaboration that highlights 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.
Image gallery
