The Roman source of Adel Abdessemed, between dynamite and roses – Rome – Arte.it

Roma – Roses and garnets. An innocent lamb sitting on a dynamite pedestal, a walking donkey and, above all, barbed wire to evoke war as apartheid.
It is the stage of symbols, icons of Adel Abdessemed, metaphors that interpret the gesture as will, but also the relationship of the French artist of Berber origin with integration, racism, nudity and overcoming the taboos imposed by religions. Symbolically, sometimes ironically, these images of energetic reorientation emulate and celebrate the risks, but also the joys, the passions, the beauty of the universe, in honor of that big bang from which everything began. For his first time in the capital, the artist with a Muslim mother, born to three Jewish midwives, chooses Primavera Romana as the title of the exhibition held until February 28 at the Galleria Continua, in the spaces of The St Regis in Rome.The exhibited drawings, developed by thematic cores and created between 2010 and 2025, transcend the boundaries of technology to capture the essence of the subjects depicted. Like casual gestures deposited together with the artist’s fingerprints, the images drawn by the line – virtuous and precise, but also instinctive, passionate and sometimes brutal – are charged with new symbolic life and meanings, transforming the ordinary into something that questions and provokes the viewer. All expressive means are used transversally, from video to photography, from drawing to painting, from performance to installation.

Adel Abdessemed. Roman spring, installation | Courtesy of Gallery Continue

History of arta large charcoal drawing on paper depicts the crucified Christ to which an arm of double-sided barbed wire has been added. At the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar. A few months after his arrival in France, Abdessemed had admired the Isenheim Altarpiece painted by Grünewald. A series of drawings emerged from the vision of one of the most realistic expressions of Christian suffering (History of art exactly) and four life-size sculptures (Decor) made by interweaving galvanized steel razor blades.
The extraordinary power of the figure of the Christ of the Passion – his ability to welcome everyone’s suffering – was reinvested in Décor.
Politics of the Studio, Pope: Piazza San Pietro takes us back to one of the most indelible images of the pandemic: an empty St. Peter’s Square, battered by water and wind, with the Pope praying in the background. The recent series Politics of drawing returns a donkey, an icon of humility and innocence, and a lamb, in the Christian religion a sacrificial animal symbol of purity and redemption, crouched on an explosive bed.
A tension between the aesthetics of the images and the violence of the ideas underlying them explodes in the series Nature Morte where charcoal and pastel vases with compositions of cut flowers, branches, pomegranates, but also fuses and sticks of dynamite are depicted. The artist entrusts drawing to build a new order that allows the intrusion of fear and amazement, where explosions threaten and where anything can suddenly happen.