A massive used helicopter, lays on the floor in the shape of a ring. If the helicopter is one of the most exclusive means of contemporary travel in an overpopulated world, it is also a military engine or a surveillance object, a metaphor of the drone. His new series of “expressionist” Forbidden Colours (2019) aren’t realized with human or animal blood, but with subterfuges borrowed from the special effects and cinema world. Adel Abdessemed takes us into a world of simulation and illusion, in the age of manipulated images or photoshopped photographs that seem more real than reality itself. As vast frescoes of the history of humanity, they witness the omnipresence and the instrumentalization of the violence, which engenders nothing but passivity and habituation. The imperious violence of their course tells the suffering and the difficulty of writing the world today. Extending Jackson Pollock's all over technique, they are palimpsests of spills or dripping decomposed into successive layers of blood, just like the constant spill of violence that is spread out every day, beyond all borders. They sharpen our emotional sensitivity to violence. They affect our vulnerability by deconstructing our solid and reliable preconceived worldviews. 

Abdessemed provokes but does not criticize, he strikes but refuses any commitment, any kind of moral judgment. He tirelessly exacerbates cruelty to increase the spectator’s awareness towards the irrationality of the violent act, encouraging him to take some distance. The exhibition re-enacts this oscillation between the tragic and innocence, war and peace, around which the artist adjusts his voice: “I feel like a messenger of the minimum,” he says.