Come in terra

In June 2012, the Janine Rubeiz gallery in Beirut presented a first solo exhibition in which Zad Moultaka showed around ten large-format works gathered around the title “Le feu de l’eau”. Water, gasoline and paper have allowed the artist to explore themes that particularly haunt him; tearing, displacement, a quest for harmony generated by opposing forces, here the encounter of a priori antagonistic elements such as water and gasoline.

“Come in terra”, presented in the framework of the Palazzo Albrizzi in parallel to the Venice Art Biennale 2015, is the result of a natural development of “Le feu de l’eau” with a material that is enriched and complexifies; water, essence, acrylic, ink, cardboard and fine paper collide in this pictorial space in which not only the surface of the painting is constantly questioned, which is the very nature of the pictorial act, but especially its support. In fact, by questioning and “replaying” the painted surface, the back of the painting is also involved in the metamorphosis and also engages in the game of mutation. The painting becomes a space that we turn over and plow like land. “Come in terra” could represent a quest for a place that cannot be found, always in the making, thereby becoming the place of a great vital energy.

In collaboration with the Alliance Française de Venise and the Associazione Culturale Italo-Tedesca Venezia

Moultaka is constantly digging the earth to better question the sky. “In search,” he says, “of a place that cannot be found, always in the making”, the artist has made of this absence, of this non-existent in-between, “the place of a great vital energy”, which is the foundation even of its aesthetics and its life. It is an accident, arising from the croup and the Ravelian leap, which will free the painter’s unconscious reveries from their prison. Soaking a paper stained with paint unrolled on the floor with too much water, it becomes heavier, softer and tears. From this catastrophe, Moultaka draws a method and conceives a new wall art of rupture and shattering. The meeting of the torn space and the gullied flow of Zad Moultaka with the liquid body of Venice, the easternmost of the western cities, could not but take place. Emmanuel Daydé, curator.