Racine Carrée de U | OUSSEMA TROUDI

November 2009 - December 2009 | La Soukra

There is a risk in attempting to retrace the itinerary of form, that of losing certain places once made habitable. The discovery of desire, like that of drawing a statement, of configuring genealogies or of finding signs for a sensation of thought, is that very discovery which inaugurates the worksite of the unusual.

It is not easy today to invent new figures for new “plateaux”, for with each new landscape one may be confronted with the absence of any mark of the iterable. Yet these drawings managed to reach toward the discovery of new “plateaus” and establish dative marks of a measure that seeks to be and invents itself as arithmetic and grammatical. To draw is not so much to be a draftsman, but to become, through drawing, a draftsman. To become a draftsman is perhaps to slowly guide a loving iteration until opening a visual gap within the frame, so that a new word may be given to that which is denied literature: the drawings of Oussema Troudi.

To draw an elephant until becoming it. Thus with Mozart’s music: it does not illustrate a landscape crossed by birdsong, it is the music that becomes birdsong. To multiply the primary entity, to multiply the portrait of the elephant, to give graphic-animal presence a multiplicity that is neither minor nor fragmentary, to work metamorphosis toward haecceity, is in some way to make the space invested into a herbarium. Through arithmetic columns, through a geometric device, the doubling creates a surprising genesis that opens and frames unknown, unnamed and perhaps unnamable lands, lands that appear in cryptic terms.

The drawings and drawing-paintings of Oussema subject the gaze to a form of seeing that tries to recognize itself and settle within an aesthetic. The gaze insinuates itself between glimpsing and seeing, vibrating in a new necessity: to find itself in the experience of a way of recognizing inter-vision. The implication of the topoï of a double desire and a double termino-graphic gesture. The close-up as the limit of unveiling, the cutting-reconfiguring as the conjugation of the continuous-discontinuous affirm the anchoring of the exhibition as a whole in the desire to bring into literature that which had been dialectically excluded from it.

The drawings re-arrange heterogeneities in an order of montage that follows a sequence of framings, returning us to the nostalgia of correspondences according to Baudelaire, affinities according to Goethe, ontological points according to Bataille, and perhaps certain poetries as sites of catastrophic contiguities. The framing makes forms take figure: some confront the gaze, others compose multiple choreographies of conflicts.

Square Root of U, the provenance creates distance but records the molecular genealogy of a visual thought.

- Hayet Tlili

ARTIST: Oussema Troudi

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