Younès Rahmoun Madad
Galerie Imane Farès, Paris 24 February – 23 April
Younès Rahmoun’s latest exhibition is composed of visual codes and motifs that hint at an unexplained internal logic. Nevertheless, you are left in no doubt that the artist is attempting to engage with big subjects: belonging, spirituality and the substance of light itself. These concerns, it appears, are best articulated on a humble scale. The largest work, Madad-tayf (Madad-spectrum, 2022), comprises ten columns of multicoloured blown glass cylinders, 77 in all, casting a spectrum of shadows onto the back walls of the opening gallery. Glimpsed from the street, it has the air of an object in an interior design showcase – an aesthetic at odds with the rest of the exhibition’s contents.
Much more successful are works that dwell on the theme of domesticity – again, belonging – and its absence: throughout, we encounter palm-size resin models of houses resembling enlarged, transparent Monopoly-board properties, a succinct visual shorthand for the notion of ‘home’: in Manzil-fatil (2021) the model is perched on a shelf, high above eye level; in Manzil-hawd / Manzil-jabal (House-basin / House-mountain, 2022) it has been placed atop a ziggurat of upturned traditional copper cooking vessels of the kind ubiquitous in Rahmoun’s native Morocco; in Nôr-manzil-nôr (Light-house-light, 2022), meanwhile, the house is positioned in the centre of a projection of rippling golden light.
These allusions to rootedness meet their opposition with Hajar-dahab (Stone-gold, 2022), a bowl containing a collection of pebbles Rahmoun has amassed in his travels. Bringing objects sourced from disparate territories together in a new setting is both a kind of ritual for the artist – whose past performances have frequently involved similar gestures – and an open-ended political statement. Viewed in the context of the refugee crises unfolding on Europe’s fringes, these stones are a simple but affecting metaphor for migration.
Small amounts of gold are used sparingly throughout, with thin strands of gold leaf inside the resin houses, a small golden egg in among the pebbles, gold sequins on the hem of a woollen cloak hanging from a wall. The subtle, reflective glow of the metal against the walls gives the display a quality of the devotional, an apparent allusion to the artist’s interest in Sufi faith and philosophy. This spiritual dimension to Rahmoun’s practice is an attempt to grapple with the sublime, with ideas of a magnitude beyond the confines of language; on the whole, he does so with great nuance and delicacy. Digby Warde-aldam