Kevin Rouillard

Taqale [taqalε] v.t < taq. Accoler, Souder, se Débrouiller

Selebe Yoon is pleased to present «  Taqale [taqalε] v.t < taq. Accoler, Souder, se Débrouiller » , a solo exhibition by French artist Kevin Rouillard, following a 3-monthsresidency. The exhibition will be held across two sites: in the urban space on Avenue Hassan II - one of Dakar’s busiest shopping streets and at the gallery. 

Since 2016, Kevin Rouillard flattens, hammers and welds metal barrels - a commodity container on which relies our globalised world. In Dakar, the artist discovers depleted, rusted and soiled materials, used until exhaustion - a stark contrast to those found in France. As he finds himself at the end of a consumption line, “la débrouille” (the act of sorting things out with what is available) becomes his operating mode. Like a worker, Kevin Rouillard repeats the same trying gesture from piece to piece: cutting, slicing, hammering and welding are the chores that compose his mechanical mantra.

At 5 meters high, on a large distribution store’s billboard called Casino, lies the artist’s first public piece in a site of symbolic importance: near Dakar’s harbour, the work temporarily replaced the advertising of a store that welcomes daily numerous commodity containers. After his first Billboard exhibited at Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris in 2020, this new version made of 3 columns of blue barrels inserts itself in the urban landscape, amongst other commercial banners. By rubbing out the original tags glued to the metal’s surface, the artist reveals muted forms that suggest the history of these materials while erasing it.  Often vandalized in times of social uprising, this advertising board is turned into silent landscape, an empty screen dedicated to any passerby’s imagination. “A lighthouse visible from afar” as the artist names it.

At the gallery, visitors are immersed in a panorama of paintings made of blue, red and green barrels. From this combination stems a rational logic, a modular method that unfolds based on specific rules chosen by the artist: to produce twenty eight works of one square meter, made of eight barrel pieces juxtaposed onto two columns with only three colors at hand. Upon these repetitive geometrical shapes lie the accidental details of each. Each work’s unique imprints of oxydations, deformations, scratches and tonal variations become witnesses of their past. 

While Kevin Rouillard’s first use of metal barrels begins in 2016, upon discovering  how the Cap-verdian diaspora ships materials from France to the island - the artist’s countries of origin -  his works raise new conceptual questions at each of project. In Dakar, what is the significance to lift a quasi-architectural work, made of materials so visibly present in West African capitals, that unequivocally reminds of the growing economic optimism placed upon the continent? What difference will there be between the visitor that willingly observes the work in a gallery setting accompanied  by an explanatory text, and the passerby on the curb, that catches an involuntary glimpse at the work, without even knowing the qualification of this object as a work of art?