Since the early 2000s, Mehdi Cibille has been exploring the visual and graphic elasticity of a form, four spheres connected to each other by small ball-and-socket joints. This reticular object drawn in black, with a thick line that delimits and contains, is the Module of Zeer, for experimental zone of relative expression. By multiplying, stretching, isolating, condensing and deforming this form, putting it to the test of multiple spaces, supports and scales, Mehdi Cibille questions both the plastic permanence and the perpetual evolution of a logo that has become a logo, both a reason for being and an element of visual discourse. Here, a single letter serves as an alphabet. It allows Mehdi Cibille to create a plastic and metaphysical universe, to put into play, as actor and spectator, the autonomization of the artistic form.
In an exploration that aims to create a homogeneous universe, from formal self-references that feed on themselves until they become autonomous entities, Mehdi Cibille becomes the "craftsman" of Le Module de Zeer. He invests the street, the city and its interstitial spaces. Walls, parks, disused buildings, industrial wastelands will be the first territory of his art, an urban art therefore - Street Art - but above all a social and political act. The book Spraycan Art (Henri Chalfant, 1987) had opened the doors to this universe when he was a teenager, the exhibition Graffiti. État des lieux (Galerie du Jour Agnès B., Paris, 2009) gave the artist a family (Jonone, Futura, Zevs) and fellow travellers (Moze 156, Sydney). From now on, each intervention allows him to push Le Module de Zeer beyond its own limits. The motif, because it is indeed a motif (a reason, a pretext as much as a theme and a drawing), metamorphoses according to the transformations imposed on it by the artist. In Equation (Clichy-la-Garenne, 2014), Le Module goes from being a "figure" to an amalgam, from a static element to a landscape, a landscape that he is not content to compose but also to inhabit and set in motion. Through the tension he creates, Mehdi Cibille points to the disastrous fate of a Maison du Peuple designed in the 1930s to be a stage for collective life, and now obsolete. Whatever the context and the medium, the artist always inserts his action where he detects a flaw, a paradox, a contradiction in the public space. In a work, he makes contact, rubs up against, confronts, and in so doing challenges and invites us to take our place in the collective, in what makes society. Start Game Over (Paris, 2009), Croissance par le milieu (Pantin, 2014), Derrière cette porte tout est possible (Issy-Les-Moulineaux, 2016) and Monumenta des Quartiers Nord (Marseille, 2017-2018) call for us to look at and consider what is common, ordinary and even outdated in our civilisation. More recently, Dialogue (Palais Royal, Paris, 2018) was formulated as a word addressed to what was there, established in a landscape that had been a work since Daniel Buren's intervention, established in an institution - the Ministry of Culture - that was opening up to urban art.
Invited to transpose his urban interventions into the galleries, Mehdi Cibille works on the link, the correspondence between two approches that, on the surface, might seem to oppose each other. The gallery work sometimes takes over from the street work, as was the case from Start Game Over (Paris, 2009) where each erased stencil gave rise to a canvas, then to "positive stencils" - Matrice (X) and (O) - exhibited in Clichy-la-Garenne in 2014. Elevation, presented at the repeat of the group exhibition Graffiti. État des lieux (Galerie du Jour Agnès B., Paris, 2013), allows Mehdi Cibille to put in tension his wild interventions on the "trucks of Belleville" (since the early 2000s) and the White Box of the gallery; the volume serving as a support for the work is the same - a white parallelepiped - but the plastician practices it differently: from the outside without being seen on the walls of the gallery. Art as the ultimate mise en abyme.
Éléonore Marrantz
Architectural historian
University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (School of Art History and Archaeology)