Topographics

"I imposed a rule on myself: fill forty double pages of a notebook, without repentance, produce a regular flow of images, of “visions”, like the continuum of words written on the parchment scroll of Kerouac's On the Road, but in a stubborn immobility. This involves staying long enough on a site to capture all the subtleties of the landscape, armed with a felt-tip pen and a notebook. drawings emerge from the open pages, scrolling like a series of snapshots of the city, an urban imprint tattooed on paper, the fruit of street art contemplative and solitary. Standing, the notebook held vertically at arm's length, without any preparatory sketch, the composition imposes itself; it gradually emerges from the lines which intersect and make two structures coincide: that of the outside and that of the leaf. The slowness of the poses allows the changes in light to be captured. After some time, some buildings, invisible in the shadows, appear. » After dedicating a Notebook to Montreuil, Mehdi Zannad takes over the streets of Marseille for several months to blacken the inside of his Moleskine, format 9 × 14 cm. The book, which reproduces all the views, is also an opportunity for the artist to reflect on his drawing techniques and engraving. The memory of the influences that nourished it accompanies a panorama of previous works devoted to urban, industrial, landscaped or architectural. So many illustrations of a "method", as personal as meticulous, urban landscape sketch.