An unprecedented scenography for a cross-sectional look at the three artists.
Hatchikian Gallery presents an event at Quai 36 that will open the year 2023: a Group Show, an exhibition of three internationally renowned artists whose universes will be brought together through an original set design imagined by curator Audrey Hatchikian. Chazme, Nelio and Zabala have invested walls around the world with monumental and captivating works of art thanks to their evocative power, before exploring the canvas in the studio for a research that opens abstraction to new creative directions.
Audrey Hatchikian is passionate about discovering urban artists whose aesthetic language takes on new dimensions on canvas, deconstructing the pictorial practices as well as the sometimes too dichotomous categorizing of artistic movements. This is a way to take the viewer to unexplored horizons, to disorient them, by going beyond the preconceived oppositions between figuration and abstraction, between formal research and chromatic narration. This is above all a way for this passionate art lover and art encounter to share and convey her visual emotions.
Chazme, Nelio and Zabala: from the wall to the canvas.
After two long-term exhibitions, Carte Blanche with Yann L’Outsider and Art Habité by Zepha, Audrey Hatchikian wanted to bring together these three artists: Chazme, Nelio and Zabala. These three talents, who first emerged as muralists, have in common the ability to give rhythm to space, depth to perspectives, and to play with the volumes of the supports to recreate lines, visual horizons, or abysses. All three of them are remarkable colorists, and their pictorial expression reveals chromatic nuances that a common scenography will allow to be highlighted.
Projects in urban space with Quai 36.
All three have been invited to collaborate with the Art Production House Quai 36, whose mission is to integrate the contribution of artistic creation into social ties and the issues of urban planning. The projects carried out by Quai 36 introduce art into the transitionary public spaces transformed into creative platforms to disseminate an aesthetic interest accessible to all.
Chazme, who lives and works in Poland while intervening in different countries around the world, created a mural on a construction site for a real estate project in Courbevoie with Quai 36. A graduate architect from the University of Warsaw before dedicating himself to art, Chazme was inspired by the plans provided by the real estate developer to represent, with the unique aesthetic appeal of his work, an abstraction of the emergence of urban constructions, evoking, in the form of hypnotic labyrinths, the postmodern patterns as figures of social life: «I link a rigid geometry to poetic scenarios in order to propose, rather than a mere urban landscape, a tangible vision of life, the atmosphere and the soul of these places.».
CHAZME – Long story short, July 2022
Acrylic paint
Wall mural for the Îlot Fauvelles project, Courbevoie (92)
Nelio, an artist living near Lyon who works with the forms and nuances of abstraction, was also asked to participate in the creation, alongside nine other talented artists, of a mural on the former Babcock industrial site, a former boiler factory located in Courneuve: a work on a tone of colors of evanescent forms disturbed by the intrusion of a bright orange beam. The artistic transformation of this monumental facade takes place in a transitional space destined for rehabilitation to become an innovative cultural hub for Greater Paris. Nelio is once again invited to intervene with Quai 36 as part of a new in-situ project that will be unveiled soon. He alternates public space works in France and internationally and pursues artistic research in the studio, around series of evolving works that coexist with the antagonistic propositions of formal minimalism and abstract expressionism.
NELIO – 22 07 02 12 00, June 2022
Acrylic paint
Friche Babcock for the Fabrique des Cultures, La Courneuve (93)
Zabala is a talent spotted by Quai 36 who wanted to include him in his network of mural artists for works that will take shape as early as spring 2023 in an emblematic location. Zabala lives and works in the Basque Country in Spain, but has made a name for himself through interventions in Europe and around the world, in which his hyperrealist pictorialism animates the places he extends from an eminently vital perspective, confronting the natural element with the artificial construct. His canvases take up the abstraction of the element (water in particular), or feature stylized everyday urban scenes.
ZABALA – Winter Solstice, December 21, 2021
Acrylic paint
At the foot of the sacred mountain of the island, designed for the next winter solstice.
Tindaya, Fuerteventura (Spain)
These three artists have moved from the wall to the canvas, from in-situ interventions to pictorial research in the studio, without denying their urban statements: on the contrary, their approach is rich in a diversity of media and practices that mutually nourish each other and give a particular consistency to their aesthetic questioning.
The enthusiasm of gallery owner Audrey Hatchikian for three talents.
Audrey Hatchikian had already followed the development of the work of Chazme, Nelio and Zabala with interest and emotion, finding particularly stimulating the extent to which their works are deployed through this interplay between the urban space and the studio. She appreciates their way of manipulating space as well as the singular subtlety that permeates their approach to color. A particular delight in Nelio’s chromatic and formal research, a delight in Chazme’s aesthetic horizons that open windows through the walls, a delight in Zabala’s immersive effects, especially through his work on the substance of water: the idea of imagining a scenography to weave links between these three research projects on a common theme has captivated the gallery owner.
The resonances between the artistic statements at the heart of the exhibition.
The three artists approached for this Group Show were enthusiastic about the idea of bringing together their works and thus questioning the resonances of their statements. All of them accepted and began to seek their inspirations for this exhibition. As their work progressed, the entire appeal of this joint presentation was confirmed.
Audrey Hatchikian developed the scenography for this exhibition by imagining that it would be even more fascinating to bring together, within the Espace Quai 36, not only their works in the studio but also to open the viewer’s eyes to the wall-based dimension that nourishes their work. Exterior and interior walls will be dedicated to in situ creations by the three artists, in order to understand how their approach unfolds across different media and how the de-bureaucratization of practices operates in their artistic development. The scenography of this Group Show gives a particular scope and depth to this presentation, which will open in January to illuminate the first months of 2023. This exhibition, which will be held at the Espace Quai 36 within the Fiminco Foundation in Romainville, confirms the vitality of this new art destination in the east of Paris around this new cultural hub in development.
Each spectator will be able to appreciate in their own way the obvious or more imperceptible echoes between the works of these three remarkable artists that question the architecture of the world-scene we inhabit, its geometries, its poetry, its dreamlike dimension, its lines and horizons, its organic forms, its nuances of color, and its materiality juxtaposed with its naturalness. This is a way to open our eyes to unprecedented dimensions that only art makes visible.
