Fayçal Baghriche and Daniele Genadry’s joint presentation reveals a shared fascination with fading resolution and image degradation. Each artist offers flawed, unstable imagery: Genadry through spectral, evanescent canvases that challenge the viewer’s sense of perception and continue her pursuit of pure light, Baghriche using his playful conceptual language to conjure warped and grotesque figures. Deeply attuned to one another’s work, the pair showcase this familiarity and shared vocabulary through a display that brings their practices together.
Interrupting Vision
The eye is first drawn to Daniele Genadry’s Trees (Transparent Time) (2026), a 4.5-meter-high vertical painting triptych. While Genadry often employs triptychs to extend the horizon line, here, the height of the gallery space prompted a vertical composition where towering trees guide the viewer’s eye. This shift raised new formal challenges—drawing the viewer’s eye upwards, representing tall objects without spatial distortion—while opening new possibilities. Genadry is drawn to images emerging from the distance or from another dimension that arrest the viewer and command stillness—an effect she terms “apparitions”. To achieve this, the triptych’s composition works through foreground, middle ground, and background planes: the trees frame a central space, drawing the eye straight into the distance toward a waterfall in the background.
Genadry often revisits this specific waterfall in her practice, as seen in Blind Light (2017), first presented at the 2017 Sharjah Biennial. The image traces back to 19th-century photographs by Carleton E. Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge of a waterfall at Yosemite Park. In the original plates, a long exposure rendered the falling water stream as a torrent of white radiant light, appearing to cleave the mountain in two. The photographs fascinate Genadry for their capacity to bring in pure glowing light, to startle and unsettle the viewer and destabilize the perceived nature of the landscape.
By contrast, horizontal works such as Lake Line (Dream V) (2026) offer no single anchor point for the eye to focus on. Rather than framing the view, the trees here fracture perception, making the horizon line hard to follow, denying the image a singular center and forcing the eye to wander continuously across the surface.
Alongside this new body of work, Genadry presents recent paintings that share similar visual vocabulary and interests. On the mezzanine, paintings based on images of a Lebanese mountain attempt to capture the viewer’s gaze using faded colors and by establishing a relationship to time and distance. Dimensions of Time (2025) reflects directly on the porosity between photography and painting that Genadry often questions in her practice. Originating from her own photograph of a mountain in the north of Lebanon, the work embodies the artist’s intention to capture several temporalities at once: a steady, enduring peak set against the rapidly passing present moment. On the canvas, the mountain stands as a site where time freezes and reaches a sense of eternity, juxtaposed with elements of shimmer and vibration. The source photograph was captured from a moving car, while a segment on the right is taken from another image captured in a stationary position. Layering different movements and temporalities in one image, Genadry superimposes the passing present of movement with the descriptive, supposedly more objective time of standing in place.
Cactus (Still Time) (2025) inhabits the same landscape as Dimensions of Time but introduces an interfering geometric pattern that distracts the eye and disturbs focus. Pink Apparition II (2023) aligns more explicitly with Genadry’s “apparition” framework, offering a startling image with little information that frustrates perception, where the eye struggles to form the image. In both paintings, a foreground keeps the gaze occupied and in motion, contrasting with the static elements beneath.
Genadry’s paintings include markings that frame the image: lattices, folds, margins, and grids which, appearing as remnants of a mechanical process, undermine the image’s naturalism. They remind the viewer that they aren’t looking at a landscape, but at a deliberately constructed image of one. Genadry establishes a tension between the desire to read paintings as windows into spaces and the desire to read photography as objective information. The result is neither a photograph nor a painting as painting, but a scattering of presence that speaks the language of both.
A Crowd of Monsters
In turn, Fayçal Baghriche’s flawed images are also preoccupied with reproduction and imperfection, pushed by his interest in monstrosity, the difference that scares. In his new body of work titled The Village, Baghriche presents a series of ceramic sculptures modeled after the small tokens found in the galette des rois, a traditional French “king’s cake” served during special meals every January. The tokens, called fèves, inside each cake are small ceramic figurines—historically fava beans, hence the name fève—and whoever finds them in their slice is crowned king or queen for the day, complete with a wonky, foldable paper crown. Originally rooted in Christian traditions celebrating the Epiphany, the ritual devouring of this round almond cake has evolved into a largely secular tradition—a reason to gather and mark the new year across every family, school, and workplace throughout January. For this writer, the fèves immediately evoke childhood: as the youngest in both my family and my class, tradition dictated that I spend many Januarys under the dinner table, calling out who would receive each slice to keep the fève distribution fair in case a bit of ceramic showed on the side of the cake.
To create these sculptures, Baghriche sourced cheap, mass-produced items—often eBay finds or Lidl fèves—and enlarged them to a scale closer to the human face. He deliberately selected forms defined by monstrosity, flaws, and asymmetry, such as misaligned eyes, misplaced mouths, and raw mold seams. Even within an industrial assembly line, these production errors created non-identical, flawed objects; by scaling them up, Baghriche amplified their clumsiness and rendered their defects deeply touching. These fèves encompass a vast range of subjects, moving from traditional figures like Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary to today’s far more common pop-culture icons, animals, and everyday objects. Often roughly crafted, cheaply mass-produced, weird and imperfect, these figurines remain powerfully evocative and massively collected. By blowing these artifacts up many times their original size—sculpting, casting, glazing, and refiring them—Baghriche displaces this object usually considered unworthy of artistic consideration into a subject of observation and fascination.
Carrying this lifelong familiarity with their subject, Baghriche’s sculptures immediately strike me: I recognize their rounded texture and crude lack of detail, and see Baghriche’s cheeky gesture right away. Yet, familiarity brings the toughest challenge: for the viewer in the UAE or elsewhere, where the vast majority will have no point of reference for the object, must the sculpture be translated and explained, or can it be fully understood without prior knowledge? How will these sculptures be read outside their context? Will they be read as an act of abstraction, or perhaps as the erasure of a vanishing face that once was there? My hope is that the artwork holds enough depth to reveal multiple layers: while little write-ups like mine can help unfold these subtexts, the artwork itself should not depend on written explanation to intrigue and challenge the viewer.
At their core, the sculptures remain a conceptual gesture: the act of copying humble, everyday items not typically deemed worthy of being copied. This approach directly relates to Baghriche’s own Imperfections (2010), in which he framed panes of faulty industrial glass marked with felt-tip pen by a professional art framer to prevent their use. By isolating the mark that drew attention to the defect, Baghriche converted a rejected object into artwork—much as he does now with the awkward, one-brush smiles of these ceramic figurines, continuing his fascination with gestures devoid of aesthetic value or, in other words, non-intentional aesthetics.
Here, the artist delves into the strange friction created when an object’s scale, medium, and display context clash with expectations. With these imperfect sculptures, Baghriche navigates the risk that plagues anyone exhibiting flawed objects: will their defects be read as intentional artistic choices or a lack of technical skill? Paradoxically, reproducing these flawed figurines demands immense labor and precision. Baghriche is not a ceramicist by training or practice. By his own account, this is his first time involving himself so directly in the material making of a work, complete with the physical and mental exhaustion brought by a medium so notoriously unpredictable. By choosing to craft the works himself, rather than commissioning copies, he embraced this uncertainty, elevating the copy and creating new imperfections at scale rather than chasing technical mastery.
The resulting forms emerge eroded and ghostly, spanning from recognizable religious figures to barely identifiable shapes. Though clearly perceived as anthropomorphic figures, they appear worn down and polished by time—recalling Edvard Munch’s screaming figures or, more cheekily, Cecilia Giménez’s infamous restoration of an Ecce Homo fresco in a rural Spanish church. Perhaps due to my own familiarity with Catholic depictions of nativity scenes, seeing them grouped together, they immediately read as a Nativity. Despite lacking explicit religious markings, the composition and posture of the figurines—some slightly bent, others kneeling—retain an abstracted trace of their original role. Stripped of precise facial details, their faces lock into pure expression and raw emotion.
Daniele Genadry
Daniele Genadry (b. 1980, Baltimore, Maryland) lives and works between Paris and Beirut. She studied at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
Working primarily with painting, photography and print to examine conditions and contemporary forms of seeing, her practice considers the potential of an image to generate its own temporality (light). Often based on landscape motifs, the paintings seek to act physically on the viewers’ eyes, requiring a time of adjustment. Their aim is to give an image form to a particular quality and force - of presence, fragility and disappearance.
Genadry was the Abbey Scholar at the British School at Rome (2013–14), a Bogliasco Fellow (Italy, 2019) and a Camargo Foundation Fellow (France, 2021); in 2024, she was the recipient of the Munn Artist Fellowship and Award in Giverny, France. She has participated in residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; the Bronx Museum, New York; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Colorado; Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Italy; and Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium.
Recent institutional exhibitions include those at IAIA, New York; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen; Beirut Art Center; Sursock Museum, Beirut; MUCEM, Marseille; GAMeC, Bergamo; SMBA, Amsterdam; Bronx Museum, New York and Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome. Her work has been included in the Sharjah Biennial 13 and 17 and Biennale Gherdëina IX, and in exhibitions at the National Museum of Beirut and the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, among others.
Fayçal Baghriche
Fayçal Baghriche (b. 1972, Skikda, Algeria) is a French-Algerian multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Paris. He studied Fine Art at the Villa Arson, Nice.
Baghriche has participated in major international exhibitions including the Dakar Biennale, Senegal; the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; and the Frestas Triennial, Sorocaba, Brazil. In 2011 he was included in The Future of a Promise, a pan-Arab exhibition presented as a collateral event of the 54th Venice Biennale. His work has been shown at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Mucem, Marseille; FRAC Normandie; Delfina Foundation, London; The Mosaic Rooms, London; Villa Arson, Nice; Centro Pecci, Prato; Malmö Konstmuseum; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Arab Image Foundation, Beirut; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Algiers; and Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York.
His work is held in collections including the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), France; Zayed National Museum, Abu Dhabi; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; Saudi Arabian Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA), Riyadh; Black Gold Museum, Riyadh; Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunisia; and the European Central Bank Collection, Frankfurt, among others.
