Fouad was born in Marseille in 1981. As an industrial draftsman he worked, unknowingly, for the arms trade; this alerted him to the opaque nature of networks and the compartmentalised way our sophisticated tools are manufactured. He dreamed of a metalanguage that could describe how things really are.
Classic career path
Léonard de Vinci high school, vocational baccalauréat, diploma from the Marseille-Luminy and Lyon art schools, lectures in China, artist in residence at La Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille, founding of the Saut du Tigre record label: a classic but varied career. He has had exhibitions at MAC in Marseille, the Stedelijks Museum in Amsterdam, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Éric Dupont gallery, also in Paris. Last year he graced the opening of the FRAC PACA contemporary art space in Marseille with 40,000 firecrackers. He lives with his wife and children in Marseille, and is preparing more exhibitions.
Monumental installations and sound performances
Fouad sets out to bring us a new language through which mechanical, graphical, statistical, digital, literary, three-dimensional and gestural objects will speak their truth. These are multiform metaworks, embodying the magic of abstraction and the irony of things taken out of context, as with his concrete-cube Coach Tunings, his ‘improved’ Bugatti Veyron and his spaces subjected to explosions. Sounds and sights speak to us from an abyss where the artist is king. Fouad’s art is narrative, metaphorical and playful. His musical roots lie with Erik Satie, Philippe Glass, John Cage and their like. Among the authors he reads are Chomsky, John Sloboda, André Leroi-Gourhan and René Daumal. No doubt he’s heard about the Sorbonne lectures by philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch. There’s no doubting that with Fouad, art in Marseille will forge new networks and new ways forward.
By Gérard Martin
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