Wallpapers, waxed parquet floors, sofas… Painted with incredible meticulousness in shimmering, velvety tones, the elements that make up the interiors of Dhewadi Hadjab, the new protégé of the Kamel Mennour Gallery, have something of a false ring to them, like the sets of vaudevilles hiding some underlying drama in their stifling comfort.
In Dhewadi Hadjab’s well-executed paintings, however, there is no concealment or deception: everything is said, or at least suggested. The cracks, the fissures, the disorders… are at the heart of the artist’s strange huis clos where everything wavers: wallpapers are torn, lemons rot on the floor, sofas are overturned, as well as bodies that twist or collapse… It is this fault line, this point of rupture that interests the artist, seeking in the convulsive beauty, in the jolt of the body constrained by discomfort, a moment of truth.
Magnificently choreographed in his large canvases, these moments of abandonment combine heaviness and grace.
Born in 1992 in M’Sila (Algeria), Dhewadi Hadja lives and works in Paris, where he has just graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges in 2019, following a five-year course at the École supérieure des beaux-arts d’Alger.
Stéphanie Dulout