The exhibition gathers a series of works by Neïl Beloufa, presented for the first time in France at Mennour. In the recent developments of his practice, he set out to observe and map how our new remote and decentralised ways of life are redefining the uses of art. Those reflections led him to wholly integrate digital techniques into practice, and vice versa. They have generated a corpus of works that acknowledge and respond to the network of screens we are familiar with, to that digital empire in which our attention is caught and financialised, the following content is automatically recommended, the algorithms relay ideologies and in which, lastly, we have learned to prefer virtual existence. Of that world, Neïl Beloufa offers a double vision: one for parody and the other for paranoia, the two edges of the same blade, two images that overlap to constitute a whole, paradoxically coherent. As in his filmmaker activity, his works display a taste for language games, narratives offering multiple viewpoints, and an illusionism badly lubricated but in a subtle way. They take their audience into a reality barely dissimilar from this one, in which nothing is serious because everything is.
In “Re: Remotely Speaking”, the title becomes the expression of the tautological subject of an email. Re: as Return the courtesy, reminding us that the “Reply” back button at the bottom of an email, with its arrow going against the current in the enclosure of a cartouche, at times take on the stiffness of a cartridge and at other times the curve of an unexpected bend, but invariably, wants to mean hope for better days. The quasi-eponymous series Remotely Speaking illustrates a few genre scenes from the beginning of the 21st century: online conversations, one-to-one discussions with the abyss of smartphones and MacBooks whose lights radiate in the living space of our cabins. Alongside those representations in leather patchwork, screen canvases host videos that bring out silhouettes merging in their background. Becoming animated, they engage in a dialogue with their own preoccupations: successful professional life, ecological repentance and yoga classes. Art, tired maybe of endlessly questioning what’s at stake in representation since the century of Duchamp, ends up chatting with a fake nonchalance about things belonging to real life.
The other series of works in bas-reliefs presented in the exhibition, Double standard, also shows its subject sliding into the backdrop of the composition. It proposes an elusive response to the long genealogy of images in the image. In the Quattrocento, we could see, among others, Andrea Mantegna’s The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in which, while Sebastian tied to his column is dying and gradually becomes one with the lapidary background, displaying now his saintliness in his august role of column frontal, a small fluffy rider stands out against the clouds and carries on the path of his own life. This genealogy was later joined by Gustave Courbet’s The Meeting, in which the background to the story is not in the polished reverence of some or in the starched beard of the other, but entirely condensed in the mockery of cast shadows. There is encrypted in it already the double standards of his time. Mixing the aesthetics of video games and the new canons of entrepreneurial heroism, the interactive installation Growth, produced by Ebb.global, invites each visitor to become the protagonist of a customised script generated with the help of an AI model, in which they will incarnate a model of success in the field of technology, health, environment or society, to be selected by the player. The interactive touch screens help the visitors to create and set parameters for a user’s profile according to their personality and tastes, and especially to select some objects among the sculptures presented in the last exhibition room.
The flying saucer, the container, the tarot cards, the Bitcoin, the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the basket of vegetables and/or the hornof the unicorn, reproduced in a domestic scale in the spirited aesthetics of Play-Doh, eventually become the attributes and emblems of the participants according to their profile. In this game, which is also speculative, the price of the sculptures increases each time a player selects them. The media generated for each character are projected in a video flux integrating elements of Global Agreement (presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019), collating online interviews of soldiers fighting in armies all over the world. Growth, a machine to portray a visionary and resilient humanity, agile, pragmatic and connected in a sublimated version of itself, gathers the interests, fantasies and polarities of our world in a joyfully clashing big picture.
— Marilou Thiébault
Growth (2024) was commissionned and co-produced by Kunsthalle Basel (Basel) and Renaissance Society (Chicago)
Lives and works in Paris, France