Raphaël-Bachir Osman, At the Studio, 2021. (Photo by Florian Dautecourt)
At all costs, never lock yourself into a style. Always subordinate the painting to the subject. To make every detail an obsession. Finally, to avoid boredom. There are the watchwords that guide Raphaël-Bachir Osman’s pictural work. His series on the theme of delicacies honors pastries: éclair with velvety icing, generous chocolate biscotti on a gingham tablecloth, embossed mille-feuille toppings worked in series with a piping bag, etc. Since the subject indicates its technical treatments, the oil paint must be smeared on the canvas as one spreads chocolate on the toast. Through a claimed brazenness, his flat works absorb the codes of restoration and the iconography of the still life to better detach themselves from them. The artist strives to nestle finesse in excess. The extreme slowness of the work is put to the service of hyper-objectivity of the representation, which laughs at the art world whose absurdities it insidiously reveals. (Text by Fanny Trussard, 2022)
Between 2017-2021 Raphaël-Bachir Osman was co-director of Erratum Galerie, an artist-run space based in Berlin. His work has been shown extensively throughout Europe, including exhibitions at the Kunstraum Riehen in Basel, Switzerland, Biennale Jeune Création Mulhouse 019, and Novembre à Vitry in Paris. In 2020, he was nominated for the Revelations Emerige Price (Paris), and he has been granted the research and creation program Création En Cours – Ateliers Médicis. Other exhibitions in Paris include the Art Paris Art fair with Marguerite Milin gallery, La Chapelle XIV gallery, Jeune création at Fiminco Foundation, Valérie Delaunay gallery, Pal Project, and many more. Recently, he was in residency at Le Port des Créateurs (Toulon, France), and is participating in the Biennale of Artpress magazine (monographic exhibition at Musée Fabre, and a group exhibition at M.O.C.O Montpellier, France).
Raphaël-Bachir Osman’s residency is made possible through AAI’s ongoing partnership with Residency Unlimited and with support from Atelier Mondial Basel (Christoph Merian Stiftung).