THE PATHFINDERS

[Translator’s note: Passeur, in French, can mean a ferryman or boatman, a smuggler and also someone who is a transmitter of knowledge and culture from one era to another.]

Hassan Musa does not hate irony and his encyclopaedic knowledge of western art has allowed him to create a playground of infinite variations.

His perception of the works he revisits is nourished by distance in time and space. A symbolic distortion that allows the burden of proof to be reversed, as one would say in law. The witnesses summoned to the stand, Delacroix, Titian, Caravaggio, Vermeer, suddenly find themselves transported into a topicality and a contemporaneity of which they perhaps had no idea, even though they were – each in their own way – revolutionaries. And it is perhaps this idea of revolution – in the sense of recurrence – that the artist discreetly introduces : the concept of eternal return so dear to Nietzsche. In French, the title of this series itself, The Peaceful Boatman contains a polysemy that explores both interior and exterior senses. As for our moment in time, Musa stresses the human flows that some people have decided problematic. While inscribing very contemporary issues in his work, he manages to incorporate twists from a historical perspective.

- Excerpt of the foreword of the exhibition LE PASSEUR TRANQUILLE, Simon Njami  (January 2022)  - Courtesy of the Galerie Maïa Muller