Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix presents the gallery's third solo exhibition of Radouan Zeghidour with installations of multi-media sculptures and paintings. For the exhibition the artist has combined his another passion; writing. The result is an invitation to peek into Paris, its bygone charm conjured up with the repulsive but strangely real living beat of the city.
'I encountered Scoundrel on the Saint Michel Bridge one dull, grey and sad day, as often it is in Paris . On the bridge, as always, daily waves of working people and tourists streamed endlessly, and enthroned in the middle of this banal scene was a strange profile, a motionless and tragic spectre. Facing the Seine, he stared at the flowing river which seems to carry everything with it everyday. With a plastic bag erected on his head like a crown, Scoundrel had this hybrid allure of a lost swan, a ruined poet and of a Prince of the underworld.
A hunter-collector, he elected himself as a protector of the heritage, he wandered tearing fragments of the walls of the capital each day, like small pieces of crusts he meticulously organised in his pockets. A scavenger of his kingdom, he collected these flowers and these barks of shantytown, to construct a true book of spells, a herbarium of concrete, made of fragments and vestiges of what had made the history of his city, ironworks with ornaments at the Court of the beggars, the Roman ruins with the most ostentatious engravings.
Like Blaise Pascal, who had hidden all this thoughts in his jacket, every day Scoundrel embroidered these rags, extracts of the city. And that morning, it was by approaching him that I discovered on the ground a fragment of his treasure. A small scrap made of strange material, condensed of his collection, and which was a veritable chronicles of memories carried out with assiduity of a scientist and the fervour of a despote. In this collection of the fragments is a pell-mell, the drawings of Medusa as an allegory of the panopticon, drawings of prisoners who he named my Flowers of Prison, a profile of Notre Dame of Misery, the patron saint of all who are poverty-stricken, and the particularly atrocious and frightening chimeras.'
— Radouan Zeghidour
Radouan Zeghidour: Chronicles of a scoundrel | Press Release
Download
