"In the Western tradition of self-portraiture, painters express something unique about their relationship with the world — Dürer beauty, Rembrandt reality, Francis Bacon raw life, Andy Warhol surface — through a long series of self-stagings. Hassan Musa, an artist in the age of critical thinking and deconstruction, chooses a different way of confronting himself, blending intimacy with geopolitics.

In his self-portraits, as in all his paintings — on wood, printed fabrics, or canvas, in ink or oil — he lays bare the images and words of a vast maelstrom of cultural references, in a kind of intervisuality filtered through his biting irony, where disparate elements collide and are held together by an offbeat sense of humor. In literature, his assemblages might resemble a zeugma, linking elements from different semantic registers, or even anacoluthon, marked by discontinuities and anachronisms — in any case, by ellipsis and the implicit.

That’s the diagram, which renews the genre."

- Excerpt from the preface of the exhibition by Evelyne Toussaint.

Photos courtesy of the Galerie Maïa Muller