Meeting Pierre Relkin and Ferhat M’henni: When art transfigures horror.
Pierre Relkin doesn’t just paint, he bears witness, he sculpts memory on canvas. ‘Pogrom in the land of Israel on the seventh of October, two thousand and twenty-three’. This opening cry, sober and chilling, sounds like a prelude. In his works, violence mingles with beauty, chaos with the sacred, as if the artist, like an alchemist, were trying to transmute horror into a universal language.
Relkin summons the shadows of the past and projects them into the present. A brilliant oil painting captures the carefree atmosphere of a rave, a dance that has become a funeral. Further on, a white heron – a figure of hope and future – soars above the darkness, ready to fly over the nightmarish gouaches that punctuate the exhibition. There, shattered bodies emerge from the flames and smoke, flayed silhouettes reminiscent of the frescoes of medieval dances of death. Everything here is visceral, raw, but never gratuitous: each line carries a truth, each colour an emotion.
During this exhibition, Pierre Relkin met Ferhat M’henni, a committed artist and emblematic figure of Kabyle song. Both musicians, these two artists, driven by unique trajectories and struggles, found themselves in a conversation where nothing was left to chance: history, painting, anthropology, spirituality, social and tragic movements. Between them, an exchange halfway between contemplation and debate. M’henni, who carries within him the memory of the Kabyle struggles and the wounds of identity, saw in Relkin’s works a universal echo: the same quest for transcendence, this desire to bear witness to collective pain while offering a luminous hope. Through their exchanges, the spectator grasps that art, whether music or painting, is a vector of truth and a bridge between eras and peoples.
Relkin avoids nothing. He paints the unspeakable with a rare boldness, finding in aesthetics a weapon against barbarism. ‘Art imposes a height,’ he says, and that height is tangible. Through his works, he invites us to reflect, but above all to be vigilant: barbarity is never far away, ready to rise again if we forget.
As an artivist, I feel deeply this quest of Relkin’s: to make the invisible visible, to capture the moment when the tragic becomes light. Through his painting, he reminds us that art is not just a refuge, but a weapon, a memory, a truth. His bold mission is to ‘transform ashes into light’. And with this exhibition, he succeeds masterfully.
N.Yanat
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