ADN Galeria presents the solo shows "Le Signal faible" by Abdelkader Benchamma and "She brings the rain" by Ulrich Vogl.

 Each proposal provides an inclusive view around the idea of drawing, understood as language and conceptual frame. Beyond its fundamental graphic properties, drawing is also conceived in the works of Vogl and Benchamma as an appropriate medium to address the notions of space, time, movement, perception and reality.  

Abdelkader Benchamma is interested in subtle changes. From a practice conceived initially as a kind of writing, with a particular emphasis on the drawing’s graphical properties and the flexibility of line, the French artist formulated in the last years a more complex vision. His actual work sets visual and mental proposals as graphic architectures developed in time and space, with their own rhythms, breaks and presences. They show an “expanded” practice of drawing, opened to various sizes, techniques and unsuspected dimensions. With a real ability to explore a multiplicity of supports, Benchamma removes from drawing his academic weight, bringing in fluidity and unpredictability.

Benchamma’s second exhibition at ADN Galeria embraces drawing as a crossroad that enables connections and contaminations between sculpture, installation, découpage, video animation and static images. The title “Signal Faible” (weak signal) is taken from the field of economics: weak signals are some informal, almost imperceptible data that anticipate a trend, a change in the market. Even if analysts try to detect such micro-information and interpret it accurately, its authenticity and effectiveness remains subjected to contingent factors and not always corresponds with prognostics. A weak signal does not produce certainties, nor truth: only speculations, hypotheses, and hope for success.

 The exhibited works have been created as parts of a whole composition, organic and in expansion. The artist departs from ideas of unpredictability, of undetectable and speculated presence and the absence of distinction between the real and the imaginary to propose a multiplicity of lines of reflection and reading. A series of drawings of different sizes displays the artist’s favorite motives; they play ambiguously with, on the one hand, artificial constructions and, on the other hand, natural, mineral and human elements. The line is meticulous, neat, and, at the same time, it gets lost into complicated paths, dead ends, intersecting grounds and surfaces that lose their tangible character. Most of the artist’s productions show rhizomatic elements, related objects, links... A wooden sculpture on the pavement reproduces the pattern of a broken glass, like an open wound that seems to contaminate all the surrounding elements. In dialogue with this piece, a video-animation displays real landscapes, in which the artist introduces curious forms that slowly develop and disrupt the “normality” of the view, like alien shapes.

All the pieces meet around the idea of an expanded drawing that grows, bypasses the established boundaries and forms to propose other visual experiences. Weak signals are, if you pay attention, the indexes of rich constellations and systems that spread across the space and interact with their environment.