blank is pleased to present Upaguru, a solo exhibition by Achraf Touloub (b.1986, Casablanca, Morocco).
His first exhibition with the gallery, Upaguru is also Touloub’s first time showing on the continent. Comprising of a selection of works on paper made between 2016 and 2020, Upaguru serves as an introduction to the artist’s practice and thinking. Drawn from various bodies of work, the exhibition articulates some of the influences behind Touloub’s research interests and methodology.
In a series of small-scale watercolour drawings that are at once sensual and abstract, Touloub carries out what he terms ‘an exercise in Modernist thinking’ to define the simultaneous [physical, virtual, imagined] dimensions of the body. According to the artist, these ‘dimensions’ are continually in flux; the body - ‘in its conditions, outlines, and meaning’ - is wrapped in an ongoing process of definition, evolving with each new moment of industrial or technological development. Working inside the lineage of cubo-futurism - with the intersecting lines of repeated figure-like forms fracturing and flattening the illusion of the pictorial surface - Touloub reveals to us the effect of time and perception on an image, and the ‘precarious position of representation’1.
His attempt to represent, or “draw time” through a repetition of figures and motifs is inspired by an atavistic interest in the Persian art of miniatures2, among other traditions of image-making. In the copper ink drawing Untitled (2017), tiny, amorphous waveforms cover the picture plane. At first glance the composition is inscrutable, but gradually an internal logic or order comes into focus, compelling us to try to read the image, and discern its coded message. Ultimately, though, the visual ‘information swarms to the point that it becomes elusive, encouraging the viewer to feel rather than to contemplate the image’3.
The possibility for an artwork to produce a feeling or effect - either latent or immediate - in its viewer has roots in the Hindu tradition of the upaguru. Introduced to Western readers by René Guénon (1886 - 1951), an influential French author and student of Eastern metaphysics, the upaguru is a concept relative to the guru, and refers to ‘any being, whatever it is, whose meeting is for someone the occasion or the starting point of a certain spiritual development. […] Moreover, if we are speaking here of a being, we could just as well also speak of a thing or even of any circumstance which causes the same effect’4. Within this framework, Touloub proposes, we can consider artworks as functional objects and imagine them as tools for sharpening perception, and the production of new paradigms.
1 The artist in conversation
2 Loïc Le Gall, Viva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale Catalogue, 2017, p. 302-305
3 Exhibition guide to Anticorps, Palais de Tokyo, 2020 - 2021
4 René Guénon, Guru and upaguru, Revue Études Traditionnelles, no 265, January-February 1948
Achraf Touloub graduated at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2013. He has had solo exhibitions at the Villa Medici in Rome (2019), the Plan B gallery in Berlin (2019; 2016), the Albert Baronian gallery in Brussels (2015; 2011) and the Isa gallery in Mumbai (2015). He recently participated in the Baltic Triennial 13 (2018), the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Deutsche Bank Collection in Berlin, the Barjeel Foundation in Sharjah, and the Arab World Institute and Maison Rouge in Paris. Touloub currently lives and works in Paris, France.
His first exhibition with the gallery, Upaguru is also Touloub’s first time showing on the continent. Comprising of a selection of works on paper made between 2016 and 2020, Upaguru serves as an introduction to the artist’s practice and thinking. Drawn from various bodies of work, the exhibition articulates some of the influences behind Touloub’s research interests and methodology.
In a series of small-scale watercolour drawings that are at once sensual and abstract, Touloub carries out what he terms ‘an exercise in Modernist thinking’ to define the simultaneous [physical, virtual, imagined] dimensions of the body. According to the artist, these ‘dimensions’ are continually in flux; the body - ‘in its conditions, outlines, and meaning’ - is wrapped in an ongoing process of definition, evolving with each new moment of industrial or technological development. Working inside the lineage of cubo-futurism - with the intersecting lines of repeated figure-like forms fracturing and flattening the illusion of the pictorial surface - Touloub reveals to us the effect of time and perception on an image, and the ‘precarious position of representation’1.
His attempt to represent, or “draw time” through a repetition of figures and motifs is inspired by an atavistic interest in the Persian art of miniatures2, among other traditions of image-making. In the copper ink drawing Untitled (2017), tiny, amorphous waveforms cover the picture plane. At first glance the composition is inscrutable, but gradually an internal logic or order comes into focus, compelling us to try to read the image, and discern its coded message. Ultimately, though, the visual ‘information swarms to the point that it becomes elusive, encouraging the viewer to feel rather than to contemplate the image’3.
The possibility for an artwork to produce a feeling or effect - either latent or immediate - in its viewer has roots in the Hindu tradition of the upaguru. Introduced to Western readers by René Guénon (1886 - 1951), an influential French author and student of Eastern metaphysics, the upaguru is a concept relative to the guru, and refers to ‘any being, whatever it is, whose meeting is for someone the occasion or the starting point of a certain spiritual development. […] Moreover, if we are speaking here of a being, we could just as well also speak of a thing or even of any circumstance which causes the same effect’4. Within this framework, Touloub proposes, we can consider artworks as functional objects and imagine them as tools for sharpening perception, and the production of new paradigms.
1 The artist in conversation
2 Loïc Le Gall, Viva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale Catalogue, 2017, p. 302-305
3 Exhibition guide to Anticorps, Palais de Tokyo, 2020 - 2021
4 René Guénon, Guru and upaguru, Revue Études Traditionnelles, no 265, January-February 1948
Achraf Touloub graduated at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2013. He has had solo exhibitions at the Villa Medici in Rome (2019), the Plan B gallery in Berlin (2019; 2016), the Albert Baronian gallery in Brussels (2015; 2011) and the Isa gallery in Mumbai (2015). He recently participated in the Baltic Triennial 13 (2018), the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Deutsche Bank Collection in Berlin, the Barjeel Foundation in Sharjah, and the Arab World Institute and Maison Rouge in Paris. Touloub currently lives and works in Paris, France.
