“A self-portrait is a strange way of becoming another.”

In addition to his practice of drawing, sculpture, photography, video and installation, Abel Techer’s primary output is painting. (…) The almost religious aspect of his mise en scenes, tinged with the persistence of everyday worldliness, as well as his many references to church painting, work together to create an intimate portrait of a Creole society permeated with the ambiguity of its beliefs, the potential porosity of spaces and the potential metamorphosis of bodies.
This is a form of painting in which the sublime and transfiguration coexist, as do the triviality of everyday bodies and objects, the sacred and the obscene, queerness (“the malleable properties of gender”*), realism and fantasy, imagination and dreams. From one painting to the next, Abel Techer shows us the very contemporary diary of his transformations. (…) Underlying connections repeatedly link his painting to vaster regions irrigated by the vivid unconscious of Creole societies. The succession of paintings composes a sort of coming-of-age narrative in which the painter’s body constantly transforms from one canvas to the next and, in doing so, comes closer to – at least in the biblical, if not magical sense of the term – a possible transfiguration.

Pierre-Louis Rivière, 2020.
* Judith Butler, Gender trouble.

Translated by Lucy Pons | Biographical notes translated with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques - Cnap.