Passerelle is hosting the first one-man exhibition by Achraf Touloub in any institution in France. In his work, Achraf Touloub (born in 1986 in Casablanca) strives to think of the initiatory and immersive dimensions inherent in technological tools which, paradoxically, echo the representation strategies of primordial time.

For him, so-called ‘traditional’ art has an immersive dimension that blurs the boundaries between the object observed and the observer. The representations he produces do not function as windows onto the world, but rather as environments giving access to other universes or other states of awareness. According to the artist, one of the great keys to understanding our time consists in “grasping complex and intimate links between the development of technology (especially dematerialisation) and tradition, which both invite us to physical and immersive experiences”.

The artist questions what today constructs and defines the ’real’; he is particularly preoccupied by our relationship with the digital and its influence on our lives. With the Internet, an immaterial universe has already emerged, escaping all regulation but proving increasingly mastered and controlled. Indeed, social networks and the Internet giants dissect our behaviour and intrude into our habitus to anticipate our needs and desires. The real has indeed become partly dematerialised, time has been distended. The invisible has overtaken the visible. HIs work is imbued with this observation which seeks to offer a breathing space from ‘all things digital’. His work slips away from our gaze and demands time to be read. It is also an attempt to return to the essence of art. In an underlying way, Achraf Touloub asks this essential question: how does one decipher an image and what relationship should we enter into with it?

A corpus of previously unseen paintings, associated with older works, are on show in the upper gallery at Passerelle, rearranged for the occasion. The exhibition ‘Les Arrivées’ is constructed like an atmosphere, a diffuse feeling. The walls and floor are painted in a uniform colour, a neutral grey, recalling the shade of carbon copies and retouching software windows. Achraf Touloub connects his large paintings to this homogeneous space seeking an immersive effect. It’s all about making the visitor experience physical and liberating oneself from the mere pleasure of the visual. The central painting entitled Première Scène (as they split the horizon) reveals a timeless and seminal moment: two figures are communicating an experience for the first time. One could speak of oral transmission, possibly of theatre or fiction, but it is essentially a matter of inventing a new reality. These primitive, immemorial times fascinate the artist both conceptually and formally. To the artist, the schematic forms and natural colours recall an ancestral and sensitive character of art, nature in its entirety from the celestial sphere to landscapes, as much as they do ancient artefacts. These antediluvian traditions find themselves reinterpreted and re-contextualised in the ultra connected present. Through the enigmatic title of ‘Les Arrivées’, Achraf Touloub opens up a new chapter, that of painting and of a world returning to its origins.