Though his paintings convey an uncanny sense of realism and stillness, Dhewadi Hadjab is a painter of movement. Arching over, bending backwards, battling with a piece of fabric or extending limbs an inch further: the sequence captures a body wrestling with its own limits and navigating the struggle to maintain a posture on the verge of collapse. Interested in the failed gesture, Dhewadi Hadjab paints bodies in a state of inner turmoil, resisting the urge to conform to the perfect execution of a conscious physical gesture. By depicting the moment of tension that anticipates the muscles’ long-awaited release, he immortalizes the uneasy, fleeting beauty of effort, when the strain exceeds one’s capacity to handle it.

For his first solo presentation in North America, Dhewadi Hadjab reveals at The Armory Show the third act of a corpus conceived as an ongoing theatrical performance or ballet. As in both previous acts, this exhibition presents a new series of oil paintings that represent an anonymous, androgynous non-professional dancer in their attempt to move freely and conduct an improvised choreography, beyond control. From sequences of photographs he carefully orchestrates, Dhewadi Hadjab selects the most enigmatic posture to realistically translate in oil paint. Having mastered the chiaroscuro technique by attentively studying the great masters—the Baroque period with Caravaggio, Neoclassicism with Jacques-Louis David, Romanticism with Eugène Delacroix—he undertakes a study of drapery, an element he is particularly drawn to as it dictates its own form and carries the unretrievable trace of its own memory. With “Act III, Extend”, Dhewadi Hadjab invites us to extend our bodies beyond the limits of the familiar, and explores the variation of one composition through the fragmentation of a series, building suspense to reveal the acts that are yet to come.

—Megan Macnaughton