Hédy Gobaa

Cuire : le devenir pizza
01.18–02.17.2024
Room 2

The title of this exhibition, which literally translates as Baking: becoming pizza, is a wry parody of the Deleuzian notion of “devenir,” or becoming. “Le devenir pizza” is an allusion to the future, the “à-venir” of humanity and of what we will become: “roasting, here on Earth or in hell,” to quote the artist Hédy Gobaa. We are overheating, constantly subjected to the tensions from geo-historico-political dissonances and the anthropocentric environmental crisis. How should today’s world be portrayed? As conflicts erupt worldwide and temperatures continue to climb, should our current era be represented by fire? These are the questions Gobaa asks himself. Hell, if there is one, is here, perhaps even right now; we are like pizza ready to be baked at degrees of intensity that are beyond our comprehension.

In his most recent body of work, Gobaa paints a range of subjects that are, to say the least, unexpected, and that straddle the boundary between comedy and tragedy: vulnerable kittens hiding under a burning hot car engine, a satyr-like demon stretched out under a broiler, a woman sits on a boiling wood-burning beach. These are recontextualized as non-sites, suffocating environments, versions of a mise en abyme. The surface of the canvas is treated like a screen that frames a still image. We find ourselves colliding before our imminent end; a true impasse that defies our apprehensions. Here, we confront our own existence.

Gobaa’s painting style is combustible. His ember brush lights their compositions with incandescent nuances. His oil and pigment combinations are like smoking liquids. Colours, notably reddening oranges, represent flames. It’s as if the canvases were illuminated, fired up. Special lighting designed especially for this exhibition augments this effect. Gobaa’s renderings, a product of his bold technique — carefully prepared surfaces, controlled movements that ensure precise, flat tints and layered glazing — are vectors of sensation linked to heat, and even suffocation, and reveal the manifest persistence of what awaits us.

Demonstrating the radical gap between perception and reality, Cuire : le devenir pizza can be viewed as a possibly humorous, illogical experience, but one that is equipped with a sense of how we interpret the current meaning of our existence in this smoldering world.

—Jean-Michel Quirion