Mennour is pleased to present Dhewadi Hadjab’s second solo exhibition at the gallery: “Acte II : fragmenter” from October 14 to November 30, 2024.

It’s a new page of research, written in fragments, in decomposed movements, in plays on hanging which suggest tension and relaxation, the spectacle of an energy released. In his new series of paintings, those in small formats in particular, Dhewadi Hadjab is no longer only interested in the moment before the fall. He shows unreal images of positions impossible to maintain: several times in one single time and several bodies in one single body, beings about whom we don’t realise for a while that their identity eludes us.

By choosing photography as a tool serving painting, in the same capacity as the paintbrush or the paint, the artist organises shooting sessions with models of his inner circle and a whole gathering of costumes. At the moment of painting, the tones transmute into purple, bright red and fuchsia. And for the first time, the bodies displayed are cut. The framings of Caravaggio could be mentioned, but those of Dhewadi Hadjab are tighter, more enigmatic, evoking dance, the precisely composed movements of Pina Bausch, whose performances he has been watching intensely for many years.

Feet go up from a body stretched on a sofa, making a pair of powdered pink wide trousers flap in the motion, a garment made of a fluid material giving the spectator the desire to touch it. A few strokes in pencil remain visible between the preparation of the canvas and the layer of paint. Another body is trying to sit up to hug the cushion on the same sofa: an absurd position, a motion caught during a rehearsal, in a lapse of concentration on the effort, outside all rules. The variations between one painting and another are more negligible, one has to examine all the differences in the locks of hair, the curving of the back, the folds of a white t-shirt creased in the effort. A feeling of fragility emanates from those images, as well as an intimate relationship with those characters whose taut, tense muscles we are able to guess: a body pushed to its limits.

In those fragmented bodies, in those faces looking away, Dhewadi Hadjab plays with the disappearance of images. His photographic montages of images that don’t exist are the perfect vehicle for the sudden appearance of the invisible. His painting shows little and states nothing. His politically engaged work is never directly political, he paints dereliction and the social outcasts. He even has the spectator disappear at times, for he makes him free. There is no real melancholy in those images, no past, only the present, made of life and death. In another series of large formats, he paints the fragment of a body reflected in a mirror, a surface he paints for the first time in order to expand still the space and its depth. To come close to his painting, he encourages us to step over his subject, that body lying down which should be in front of us, which is made both absent and present by the image. Stepping over the subject and paying no heed to it so as to concentrate on a reflection.

— Anaël Pigeat