Descripción de la Exposición
Adel Abdessemed has always been fascinated by the material from which his work will be produced. The matter, the material being used, is an essential part of his acts. Adel questions the meaning of the images he produces using different materials and boosts not only its properties, but also the cultural and historical features that make up the material:
From wool to hashish, from aircraft fuselages to terracotta, from marbles to barbed wire, from knives and scalpel blades to metals: steel, bronze, aluminium, copper, gold, from glass to taxidermy animals, from ivory to Siwa salt, from gum to camel bone, from porcelain to jade, from rocks to uncooked clay, from plaster to plastiline, from resins to military tarps, etc.
When Adel was a child, he painted. He mainly focused on drawing and painting, but also created small sculptures made from little pieces of recycled metal. He left aside painting as he arrived in France, where he started deeply exploring the possibilities the matter can offer. Painting however, has always been omnipresent, as he says, “his eye is always painting”
It was in 2005 when Adel first worked with cans and printed metal plates, used for a small piece that was never exhibited whose title was Monsieur Poulet, taken form the film Cocorico Monsieur Poulet, 1974, from the French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouche.
Only after producing the series of sculptures from Queen Mary II (2007), and the great series Mappemondes (2010 - 2014), does he start the Cocorico Paintings, a work still being developed. This series refers directly to the millennial history of painting, appearing in each piece phrases that aren’t titles or comments, much less slogans placed on a pictorial background, but rather side notes where chance plays its soul evocative role.
Adel has always been attracted by the words he uses as essential components of certain works from his neon lights Exit, 1996 -2009, to Thanks Facebook, 2012, or in this seminal work which was The Birth of Mohammed Karlpolpot, 1999.
For this exhibition Adel adopts poetic and cultural Spanish references starting with the work entitled SEGUIDILLA, which is both a traditional form that characterizes Spanish poetry or a typical song from Spanish folklore of Andalusian origin.
Eran las cinco en todos lo relojes, title of the exhibition, is an extract from the poem La cogida y la muerte by Federico García Lorca. The poem talks about the death of the Spanish bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a writer and an intellectual, member of the Generación del 27 and great friend of the poet.
Si, tu niñez: ya fábula de fuentes is a verse by Jorge Guillén that introduces Lorca’s sad and beautiful poem Tu infancia en Menton, which evokes a lost love and an irretrievable childhood. He also takes verses from La vida es sueño by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1635), a play that questions the duality between reality and dream.
To complete the exhibition, two different types of shears that were used to cut veneer from the Cocorico Paintings are now completely camouflaged in acid colors, one in cyan blue and the other in lemon yellow. The tool becomes a work of art.
Exposición. 19 nov de 2024 - 02 mar de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. 23 nov de 2024 - 29 nov de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
