|
|
|
|
|
“An
existential moment”
Author: José. CLAER
Catalogue published by the gallery KARSH-MASSON in Ottawa (October
2005)
In the beginning, when this planet of ours was young, time and
space were intrinsically enmeshed, and seconds and places were
one, forming a single monster, Ouroboros, until Man flattened
it out and split it up, because he found linearity easier to
live with than circularity. This image arouses the imagination
of Mustapha Chadid, as a tenet he dares to challenge with such
thoughts as “time is illusion,” or “nothing
is ever truly still, “ and which he illustrates and demonstrates
with his mobile sculptures: unrefined assemblies of pulleys,
belts, motors, metal parts and other favourite materials; a
razzle-dazzle of automatons capable of strange dance motions
and random trajectories. They move with an awkward and haphazard
but quite fascinating rhythm, moving just a little with each
cycle and describing a new outline to contemplate the infinite
and the ephemeral.
A native of Morocco, Chadid studied natural sciences before
becoming a craftsman in iron and a metal fabricator; he immigrated
to Canada in 2001 and dabbled in animation and film as student
at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. A constant
theme runs through his life and his art: movement, traces of
the passage of time. It is thus perfectly natural that his current
passion should be sculpture, a branch of art that explores the
esthetics of repetitive movement and sprang from the work of
Russian Naum Gabo and French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp in the 1920s.
His works, inspired bric-a-brac, have moving parts driven by
motors, and flimsy mechanical parts that move them slowly over
a sand bed. Sand? Refer to the beginning of our second paragraph,
which mentions a country in North Africa, a Maghreb culture
whose native myths and legends come from the desert, the words
being replaced by a happy metallic clatter that offers a poetry
and a humour all its own. Onlookers are surprised by this revolution
from a static world worthy of Jean Tinguely: a development of
the “Reine scarabée”, a junkyard Queen Beetle
with a miniature Ben Hur chariot, drawn not by a horse but by
the mandibles of a sacred insect propelling a ball of sand in
a double circle, as time stands still.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
