Achraf Touloub’s By a ciphered fall at Public Gallery, London, explores unstable perceptions and post-human aesthetics, creating vertiginous canvases where hallucination and reality collide.
Touloub, known for probing the slippery border between the subjective and the objective, dismantles the traditional frameworks of visuality, offering instead a volatile space where perception mutates. The paintings in the exhibition do not settle easily; they demand an intense and prolonged gaze, pulling viewers into a trance-like engagement that destabilizes rather than resolves their field of vision.
Touloub’s work functions as an intricate circuitry, where visual glitches and abrupt destabilizations are not disruptions but essential elements. His compositions embody a vertiginous stasis—an uneasy equilibrium where the viewer hovers between recognition and erasure. This dynamic mirrors our contemporary visual culture, dominated by technological mediation and algorithmic seeing, where human perception is increasingly refracted through non-human logics. Touloub taps into this fraught landscape, creating works that appear less as final images and more as perpetual processes, ceaselessly oscillating between emergence and disappearance.
Resisting the traditional Western imperative to quantify and categorize the world, Touloub proposes a visual language that leans toward a post-human sensibility. His paintings are neither fully abstract nor figurative; they suggest signals and codes intended not for human decipherment but for an intelligence beyond our current comprehension. Here, representation becomes an anomaly, a rogue element within the systemic structures of knowledge and authority that contemporary society finds itself entangled in.
The exhibition draws from the poetic potency of cosmic events—moments where the fabric of the visible is interrupted by the invisible. Touloub stages his canvases as thresholds, sites where hallucination and reality merge, and where the collapse of certainty opens up new emancipatory potentials.
