At a time when our lives were put on hold, Vincent Abadie Hafez aka Zepha was in Guyane conducting research on the tattoos practiced with the juice of a fruit in the ancestral American culture. The return was a confrontation with this brutal halt in the course of the world. The artist returned to Toulouse, where he now lives, and found his studio on the Pyrenean plateau.
This parenthesis of timelessness was for him an opportunity to tidy up his studio and update his work: a spring artistic reset and clean-up. The artist has returned to a slow pace after a flurry of projects and meetings around the world. He has been cultivating his vegetable garden, dedicating time to his loved ones, while continuing his work for upcoming invitations and residencies.Vincent Abadie Hafez fears a return to isolationism; he deplores the closure of borders: his artistic approach is resolutely universalist, driven by an interest in ancient civilizations and concerned with creating bridges between cultures. During this period of imposed isolation, it is the connection with the viewers, the public of art enthusiasts, that is missing from the artist, who is always attentive to the other’s feelings and to their way of accepting the aesthetic message. Vincent Abadie Hafez’s work is a work that connects, that inscribes itself in a common world. It is eminently contemporary and undisciplined while honoring the source, the memory, that precedes us and gives us a consistency to deal with the otherness.
Salacié, 2017
Sculpture in acrylic, airbrush and ink on assembled wood cuts
D150 cm
Through his calligraffitis, the artist explores the figures of the letter and proposes a singular aesthetic that combines the instinctive brilliance of the provocative gesture of urban art with the beautiful elegant and applied writing. Immediacy and transcendence, rebellion and the sacred.
The work of Vincent Abadie Hafez teaches us that our roots and anchors are not fetters that would hinder the uniqueness of the subjective paths we take. Language and its graphic representations transform and enrich themselves through input and hybridization. Extending the word means expanding the horizon of thought and opening minds. The artist’s aesthetic gesture gives a breadth to the written word, and reminds us that writing is not a code but a mode of symbolic human exchange open to poetry, free and creative appropriation. Vincent Abadie Hafez honors these letters with which words are formed that bring us closer together, and laments the evils of the instrumental and functional language of advertising that invades our spaces. The handwritten source of the letter gives thanks to the hand of the artist and the craftsman as a mode of resistance: «everything either has a price or has dignity,» the philosopher wrote.
