Europe

Neïl Beloufa

Banker - on a lobby at night

2021

Banker - on a lobby at night, 2021

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Banker – on a lobby at night is part of a series of relief works by Neïl Beloufa that feature figures carved out of MDF board and layered with coloured leathers that articulate abstracted spaces. This particular work, featuring the architectural layout of a lobby in vivid oranges, brown, and black, becomes animated by the contorted body of the banker figure contained beneath. The two globular negative spaces hollowed out from the work serve the double representational function of globular eyes for the figure and lighting in the lobby. Beloufa further personifies this work as it recalls the animated faces of the neglected paintings in the artist’s studio in his short video Inside the Studio (2021). Centered around a Toy Story-esque conversation between paintings in the studio, the video serves as a comical, yet layered commentary on the secret life of paintings. This, in tandem with the relief series, offers a bold reminder on the fate of such works, which often spend their lives ‘trapped’ in storage, which is underscored by the simultaneously flat and textured appearance of the work. Produced during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the work also speaks to the isolation and containment experienced by many during periods of lockdown.

The multi-layered practice of French-Algerian artist, Neïl Beloufa occupies the space between various dichotomies. Reality and fiction, cause and effect, presence and absence are the polarities between which the artist’s work begins to take form. Developing his reflection on these by combining various media, including sculpture, video and painting into single installations, Beloufa masterfully manages to deconstruct our contemporary systems of belief by moving between the real and the imaginative. Situating himself between these polarities, Beloufa’s practice is deeply reflective. Examining established structures of power, incidentally, those within the “creative economy”, whilst dwelling on the authority that is afforded by artists in today’s society, Beloufa eliminates his dominant role by awarding agency to actors or materials, informing one another and coexisting in installations as though they are actors and props on a set. Rejecting the alias of sculptor, or any alignment to a particular set of practices or creative processes, Beloufa works primarily as an editor, constructing scenarios to facilitate intersections between different meanings that viewers might build independently.

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Neïl Beloufa Banker - on a lobby at night

Neïl Beloufa

Banker - on a lobby at night