Massinissa Selmani - La Certitude des ombres

La certitude des ombres, Massinissa Selmani’s first multidisciplinary installation, represents an opening, if not a shift in the artist’s work. For Selmani, drawing works as a revelator. The artist highlights the ambiguity of contemporary signs by selecting images from medias or archives, reframing them and having them go through an internal montage process to finally combine them with other elements. La certitude des ombres is both a drawing work and a question about what installation is.

As the artist puts it: “This piece illustrates the idea of a fictional conflict zone.” Made of a table, of drawings on paper and tracing papers, of Plexiglas and oak elements, the work creates areas of tension. Some drawn watchtowers dialogue with a set of graduated objects, which seems to indicate measurements and impose a norm or a rule. Drawn landscapes are echoed by strange clouds, unless they are fire smokes coming from some remote bombings.

As for the Plexiglas, it traces semi-transparent frontiers within the work’s singular geography. On closer look, one also notices sketches of shadows that contradict the natural ones. Opacity, transparency, blurriness, crossed perspective on what is drawn but also on this sketched territory. La certitude des ombres is an example of landscape constructed with ruins from the world’s current affairs.