Astres fruitiers

In the Dark Night

« In the blessed night,
In secret – because no one saw me,
Neither I saw anything
Without any other glimmer or guide
Except the one that burned in my heart. ».
Jean de la Croix, the Obscure Night

Before being a painter or musician, Zad Moultaka is first and foremost a child of the mountain of Lebanon and the dark night of the soul. Born between heaven and earth on the slopes of Mount Knaiysseh, in a village rich in olive trees and poets south-east of Beirut, Moultaka continues to dig the earth to better question the sky. “In search,” he says, “of a place that is nowhere to be found, always in the making,” the artist has made of this absence, of this in between non-existent, “the place of a great vital energy”, which is the foundation even his aesthetic and his life. Fiercely contemporary while remaining powerfully archaic, handling the hand and the computer with the same dexterity, all his multiform work could thus hold in one and the same attempt: “Link two banks with one voice”. The complaint that springs from this separation – cries or glides of planets – then becomes subject to poetry as music, painting and, today, for the first time, photography.
But can we really speak of photographs, whereas these paintings of absolute shade, obtained by using very weak luminous brushes, and which sweep the night in search of black vegetable stars, evoke the endless time of the Persian miniature – more surely in any case than the decisive moment dear to Cartier-Bresson? Seizing fruits in a light of eternity – by practicing a very long exposure time -, Zad Moultaka thus transforms terrestrial vanities in celestial suspensions, dust of stars, contemporary black holes. Combining the Spanish asceticism of the bodegones of the Spanish Golden Age, of Sanchez-Cotan or Zurbaran, with the phytomorphic portraits of Arcimboldo, its  ‘Fruit Stars’ join the stellar caves of Julien Salaud – who unite the symbolism of the man with the nature – at the same time as the practice of laboratory artist Hicham Berrada, who creates worlds in glass vats by soaking them with chemicals.
From Earth to the Moon, there is only a vision of scale. Zad Moultaka crosses the space by dilating it intensely, like a space-time loop. We do not see what we see and terrestrial foods are only one of the possible aspects of celestial rots. “The ruin of time is in us,” writes playwright Wajdi Mouawad. For Moultaka, time is not in ruins and we are holding space. His work with photographic black testifies to it.

Accompanied by this plastic symphony of celestial harmonies, the composer also inhabits the sounds and intimate stories of the pink house of Les Vallons with La Machine Sacrée, a closed air song living in the roar of a Ferrari engine. In the heart of the machine, nature still throbs.

« “All stopped. I abandoned myself,
Abandoning my concern,
Among the lilies, forgotten …
And the fan of cedar aired. “. »
Jean de la Croix

Emmanuel Daydé