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‘Nature morte’, 2023-2024
Charcoal and pastel on paper
Pomegranate Grenade Grains for Adel – A True-Artist
True? He was born mythological. The true-artist doesn’t know he carries the genes of super-vision. Adel received the secrets of the Pomegranate in the cradle. The Pomegranate is the fruit of the struggle between life and death. The fruit of the Song of Love in the Song of Songs. The fruit that “embodies” Persephone’s strange destiny. Just one of its grains determines the dual belonging of Demeter’s beloved daughter to life-and-death, the world above the world below, night-day. Adel is descended from Demeter and Persephone. He doesn’t know it, fortunately for art. The Artist scintillates. He is struck by illumination
Does he know that he is “naturally” in the tradition of Virgil? After the Bucolics came the Georgics, a treatise on the geopolitics of Nature that celebrates the marriage between what resists death and what transforms death into traces of beauty. Here, Adel is the author of the Ecologics. Pomegranate, fruit of life and death
We don’t know what exactly these magical words “Natures Mortes” mean. In French, it’s a kind of memento mori: remember that we are “immortal,” we are photos of mortality. Or, in related languages, we are “life arrests,” still life, still Leben, a mystery. A life captured, suspended, outside time, instant of eternity
There is a fascinating relationship between drawing and the instant of Death. With a grenade [grenade], the artist halts the race, captures [prend] from life, on the fly, catches the passage. Surprises, intercepts, overtakes [Surprend].
What remains of the passage
is a flash of revelation
Eden and Hades are adjoining, intermingled borders,
giving onto each other
A pomegranate [grenade] is also a grenade
A packet of dynamite is also a bouquet
For the love of flowers, they are cut, put in vases, doomed to death
Still-Life, Dead-Nature [Nature-Morte], a strange pictorial genre. A portrait of the deadly nature of portraits, a threatening and threatened beauty. Under Adel’s gaze, everything explodes.
Adel sees. This is his strength, it is unique. The “Grenades,” when Adel cites them, are seen-by Adel. Immense, giant, extranatural, 220 x 270 cm, they strike us.
Hélène Cixous
11 April 2024