Contributed by Rebecca Chace / Born in 1980 in Algiers, Massinissa Selmani lives and works in Tours, France and Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria. He studied computer science in Algeria and graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Tours. In 2015, he received a special mention at the 56th Venice Biennale. The following year, he won the Art Collector Prize (France) and the SAM Art Projects Prize for Contemporary Art (France). In 2023, Selmani was shortlisted for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. “A Fault in the Mirage,” his first New York solo show, is on view at Jane Lombard Gallery through April 27.
I met Selmani at Civitella Ranieri, an artist residency in Umbria, Italy. We were part of the first group of artists they welcomed coming out of the pandemic in spring 2021. We became a very close-knit group and several collaborations have emerged from our time together. In his first monograph, published by Skira, Selmani included four poems by poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar. I spent time with Selmani at the opening of his current show, and we followed up with a conversation about his work.
RC: I wanted to start with the title of your show: “The Fault in the Mirage.” Why did you choose that title? Also, you mention Susan Sontag‘s Regarding the Pain of Others, which is a book I’ve spent a lot of time with as well. I’d like to hear about that connection for you.
MS: Often when I read, I take notes on sentences or words I might use for a title of work or a show. For this show, I really wanted to focus on this question of humor and tragedy. Something playful and oneric, but with a kind of violent background. So, the word mirage appeared very quickly when I was working. It’s something between dream and reality. In my drawing, when you look closely, you often feel like there is something wrong. In the architecture there is a character that appears almost by accident.
RC: So, the “fault” is more of a crack or an opening in this sense?
MS: Yes, for example, after earthquake. A fault can be a kind of window. And I like the two layers of absurdity in the title. You have a mirage, which is not reality. Then, by adding the word fault, I add something else that opens up other possibilities in this mirage.
RC: I’m going to be very dumb and literal for a minute. For example, the animation of the dictator and the fan. The first thing that’s wrong is the dictator, there is military oppression that is deeply wrong. And then you’re adding a layer of absurdity by placing a guy in a swimming pool pointing a microphone on a long stick with a fan attached, as if that could destabilize a dictator.
MS: Yeah. For example, there is one drawing, As You Look Around, where a guy is being arrested, and the right leg of the man making the arrest is stuck inside a watering can. There is this little absurd detail that is resistant to his violence. When I read Susan Sontag’s book, I was especially interested when she spoke about Goya’s “The Disasters of War.” In this series of etchings, the background is sort of blurry, purposefully unclear. Sontag interprets this as Goya telling the viewer: this not exactly what happened, but something like this happened. He is not describing one precise event but many events. Sontag also writes that photography appears to be a description of reality, but people forget that the moment you put a frame around an image, you choose to tell its narrative. You’re also telling the story of – in French you say, what is not in the image?
RC: What is outside the frame?
MS: Exactly. And I was really interested in press photography, because a lot of the drawings in the show – the characters, elements, and architecture – came from different photos in the press, from different times and countries. It’s like taking a step back from the actual event, and by doing that you create more empathy. I think art is helpful to understand very hard situations. I think that’s why many writers use fiction, because you get more empathy through fiction, right?
RC: Yeah, I think that’s right. Sometimes you can only tell the truth through fiction.
MS: There is a romantic idea about drawing that it is spontaneous. But when I look closely at a drawing, I can clearly recognize the internal logic, like there is a secret in the line if you can read it. How the lines go, and the uses of the edge of the page. For me, the only spontaneous drawing is the very first one you ever did, as a child. That’s not a bad thing. Someone said that drawing is an extension of thought. You cannot lie. It’s simple, it’s immediate, it’s easy to understand. But it takes time, especially with work like mine because the balance is very fragile, and it’s always about this balance. When I work, I have a first idea for drawing, and you know, it’s just simple. For example, in many drawings there is the question of the wall. I have many drawings with fences and barriers. I am obsessed by that. So rather than just draw simple walls, you can also think about this question of walls and fences in different ways. For example, the architecture in my drawings is revealed by what surrounds them. Sometimes you don’t need to draw the wall, you can just have a shadow or a character to suggest the scale. When I start to work, I don’t really think about something precise. I collect things, I draw one character, an element of architecture, collecting a kind of database. Then I put everything on the paper. It’s just a way I have to work because I’m kind of a slow burn, but it’s a good way to start. You sort of wake up your brain and then see immediately what is working or not. Then I spend a lot of time removing and adjusting until right before I think that the drawing will collapse. I try to go right up to this limit.
RC: When you say you’re putting in and taking away all those different elements, do you mean that you put them together like a collage, then draw directly onto the paper?
MS: I draw elements on tracing paper: characters, architectural elements, etc., and then compose the preparatory drawing on a sheet of paper. Once my composition is finished, I take a sheet of paper for the final drawing and transfer the preparatory drawing onto it with the help of a light table. On the final sheet of paper, I draw a fine line as a reference point that can help define the composition. If you look closely, there is no outline, or very rarely. Because the outline doesn’t exist in reality. What makes the sensation of an outline is the color and the forms which create shadow and light. It’s something you’re pushing against and playing with.
RC: When I read the beautiful preface by Katherine David in your monograph, she used this term, “disruptive rigor.” That is such a great way of describing your work.
MS: You can tell more with less. I like to work with this simplicity. It costs nothing and it’s a challenge all the time. Sometimes, there is a drawing in my studio that I’ve been working on for years. It simply hasn’t arrived at that balance. Maybe I’ll never finish it, but it doesn’t matter. It’s part of the job.
RC: You were born in 1980 and came into early adulthood in the 1990s: the “Black Decade” in Algeria. The decade of the civil war.
MS: It was very strange period, the transition between the end of post-colonial Algerian socialism and the beginning of the civil war. The situation in Algeria was very, very hard. Many people moved away. My family was not hurt, but some people lost their entire families.
RC: There is an Algerian phrase from that time that is quoted in another essay in your monograph, by Stephanie Strain: “On n’a rien, mais on manque de rien.” We have nothing, so we lack for nothing.
MS: Yes, it’s inside my work and also in my daily life. That phrase speaks about tragedy but also takes a certain distance from it with a sense of humor.
RC: And what about the influence of your early childhood on your work? We’ve talked about your father’s copy shop in Algeria, and I love thinking of you as a kid playing at the back of the copy shop, surrounded by ink and paper.
MS: At that time the photocopy was only in black and white and the ink was a kind of powder. We had two different kinds of paper. One was extra wide and smooth, a higher quality. The other paper was very cheap and kind of rough. I loved that paper. It was a little bit yellow and when you drew on it, it had such a nice sensation. I was also fascinated because we had a lot of medical students who came into the shop, and, at that time, medical books were very rare and expensive in Algeria. So, they would bring one book from the university and make copies. I remember all these copies of anatomy: arms, kidneys, and brains, and because the quality wasn’t so good sometimes the copies came out in grayscale. It was beautiful.
RC: A kind of warped version of anatomical drawings.
MC: Yeah, I loved looking at them. And we always had three or four newspapers at home. My father had a kind of ritual: after lunch, he would take a break to read the newspaper. Before bed, he would spend another hour reading the newspaper. So, I grew up surrounded by newspapers, and during the civil war, many people looked at the back page first to see the cartoons. In Algeria, we had real tradition of cartooning during the 1990s. There was a satirical newspaper, El Menchar, that only lasted a few years. It was so funny. So smart. I love cartoons because even though you are living in this terrible situation, it still makes you laugh because otherwise you will become crazy. The resistance is in the humor.
RC: There’s this central theme of inside and outside in your work, and also of disrupting the barrier. I’m thinking of your animation of the small bird flying over a wall, holding part of a monument. Let’s talk about birds and clouds and shadows – even shadows of clouds.
MS: I like to draw elements that do not obey to the rules of humans, like birds and clouds.
RC: I remember when we were at Civitella, you were waking up every morning and drawing clouds as a sort of discipline.
MS: Yes! It was nice to wake up like that. It plays with the possibilities of drawing, and it’s a graphic exercise. This is true for the other elements in my drawings as well. I’m building a sort of graphic language. My first use of shadows came from cutting characters out of the newspaper to trace and put into my drawings. Because these figures are from different contexts, their shadows are totally contradictory because the light isn’t coming from the same place. Sometimes I use shadows to occupy part of the drawing or to suggest something else. Rather than draw a wall for example, I draw a shadow from something near the wall going to the ground and then up the wall. This also suggested to me the idea of the theater, because of the artificial light, and this became a kind of strategy for the compositions.
RC: Yes, your drawings often look as though they could be stage or film sets. Is that what led you to animation? When did that start?
MS: I actually started out by doing animation and installations; the drawing came out of that work. I like a suspended situation. The surrealists say that when you isolate an image, you make it eternal. Imagine that little bird trying to fly all day with this monument. I have had people who were really laughing at that animation, liking the irony, but there were also some people who said this one is very hard to look at. The suspended moment can also be something really tragic.
RC: You’re right at that edge with that one. There’s this image of hope. This one small bird could make a difference. But if you take it literally, you know, the bird will die.
MS: Yes, and you may recognize some gestures, like a protester throwing a stone, it’s the same everywhere. But if you have personal context for a big loss, what then? The image plays with your memories.
RC: I want to talk about surrealism for a minute. You were shortlisted for the 2023 Marcel Duchamp prize, and people speak about your work as being surrealistic. What’s your relationship with that term?
MS: I never say that I’m a surrealist. There are surrealist artists who have had an influence on me, which is different. I like the Belgian surrealists, like Paul Nougé. One of my favorite images of his is a group of people looking at an empty wall. The first time I saw that photo I spent one hour looking at it. There is nothing happening, but something is happening. It’s beautifully composed.
RC: Yes! I love that photo, which you included in the monograph. And are you also starting to incorporate more words into your drawings?
MS: I never expected that I would use words because I found it super hard. But then I saw how words were used in the work of Saul Steinberg. Not specifically for the meaning of the word but for some kind of graphic narrative.
RC: And Kaveh Akbar, the poet and novelist, who was with us at Civitella, has contributed four poems to your monograph.
MS: There is a kind of great connection that happened for me with Kaveh’s poetry. It’s as if one of my drawings was translated into words. We spoke a lot at Civitella, and Kaveh took away the complex I had about using words. It was also fascinating to see him drawing first, before writing. I started by using words from the captions of press images in my work. Now, I’m reading more and more poetry. It opens my mind. It’s another window that opens up.
RC: Yes, and poetry can also isolate an image. The way that you’re putting a frame around images and words leaves it open to the viewer. Which is so important, because it is political but not polemical.
MS: I think a lot about absence. When I did my first show in Algeria, there was one person, about 70 years old, who came back again and again. Finally, she told me: “I think I understand. It is all of the absences in your work that make me really uncomfortable.” I think there is kind of a kinship, unconscious things that are transmitted between the generations that can appear in this kind of work, because everything is not conscious.
RC: That’s a really interesting thing about your choice of medium. Your drawings are very fine boned, if that makes any sense, with the threat or undercurrent of violence.
MS:I like to vary the graphic approach of certain recurring elements that I draw, which also adds a playful dimension. For me, a work of art is a permanent balance between what I want to evoke, my passion for drawing, and the place left to chance.
“Massinissa Selmani: A Fault in the Mirage,” Jane Lombard Gallery, 58 White Street, New York, NY. Through April 27, 2024.
About the author: Rebecca Chace has written for the New York Times, the LA Review of Books, The Yale Review, Guernica, Lit Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications. She is Program Manager at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College, and her fifth book, Talking to the Wolf, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.
