For L.F.D.A. 02.

Fayçal Baghriche is an assiduous disrupter of the implicit, habitual signs that form part of our everyday visual vocabulary. The two works presented at La Force de l’Art 02 employ different materials, but echo each another in a number of other ways.

The first is a wall painting of stars of every form and colour, against a blue ground, in what seems at first glance to be a completely irregular, random arrangement. In fact, the image is a vastly enlarged page from a dictionary, representing all the flags of the world, on which the artist has used blue paint to obliterate everything except their stars.

The second world is a luminous terrestrial globe, turning so fast that it is impossible to make out the contours of the continents, and the demarcations separating them from the surfaces of the oceans.
Fayçal Baghriche’s installation evokes a simple, childlike decor : the Earth and the sky, or the universe and our planet. However, both works involve the deliberate blurring or erasing of specific elements, disrupting our perception of conventional images (the globe) and national symbols. The terrestrial globe, turning at such unaccustomed speed, blurs the outlines of the continents, and within these, the geographical space of each individual country ; the starry mural extending across a broad expanse of wall is the result of a diligent exercise to erase the national identities of each country by distorting one of the most significant symbols of statehood, the national flag. Baghriche’s installation invites us to look beyond superficial appearances and reapprehend the reality they conceal : the common starting-point for each of the works on show. [M.A.]

Fayçal Baghriche

Giving priority to forms of performance, photography and video, Fayçal Baghriche’s work brings out the stereotypes that sustain and codify exchanges between individuals. Reproducing scenes from daily life, the artist introduces slight discrepancies to reveal the automatic reflexes of language and behaviour that define the affiliation of these scenes with a meaningful structure. If all language reflects what we are (Roland Barthes), Fayçal Baghriche, in revealing the normative aspects of our common language, puts the functioning of our society at a critical distance. [M. A.]

Fayçal Baghriche was born in 1972, in Skikda (Algeria).
He lives and works in Paris.

Fayçal Baghriche
Epuration élective, 2004

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http://www.entrepriseculturelle.org/fayce/