Polymorphic, his art passes by the photography, the video, the drawing or the installation like so many means to replay the act of the "withdrawal", to make be born if not an event, at least a posture in front of him. And if it seems elusive, defying codes and representation, the artist's approach has nothing to do with evasion. Because the withdrawal deposits a trace or, as he evokes it himself, "attracts the attention by its desistment even [1]". It is precisely this modesty at work that makes his work a generator of possibilities of meaning. [...]
[1] "Waiting for change?", interview between Barbara Sirieix and Ismaïl Bahri, in Le Journal de La Triennale 3, editorial direction Abdellah Karroum, March 2012.
Ismaïl Bahri organizes the advent of the form, he creates devices to put in place the conditions of the event's occurrence. The Latence series shows an ink at the origin of this fixation; it coagulates and solidifies on contact with the air, forming a white circle on the surface of the glass on a background detached from the black background. These deposits then draw strata, regular or not, which correspond to the chronology of their hardening. Ismaïl Bahri's artistic gesture goes beyond the simple creation of an image to capture the form, the outcome of its existence and the time of its formation.
In this sense, if he plays with his codes, he distances himself from the scientific requirement; the experimental process, once elaborated, becomes the neuralgic center of the work. In the video Dénouement, he subordinates his slow progression to the execution of an invisible constraint in the first place and contrary to any efficiency. Tying a thread stretched out over several dozen meters, his limping silhouette moves closer, condemned to progress only according to a disconcerting gesture. The obedience to this secret rite imposes on the spectator to resist in his turn to his own temporality. Freed from any concern of "answer", Ismaïl Bahri has nothing of the scientist in his laboratory; his artistic science makes the world his laboratory. He isolates an invisible frame and works on its surface to bring out a deviance. In that, his work comes to clash any idea even of positivism; it is not a question any more of demonstrating but of unshowing, to find a way to lead to the monstration without "exhibiting" a direction, while remaining distant from any velléité of saying. To strip, in some way the act of monstration of its will to impose a posture, a speech.
Or how to underline again the possibility for the tiny to create the event. Hence the importance of the propagation by capillarity in his approach. With the series of photographs Sang d'encre, the skin becomes a constellation. Contrary to the painting matter, fantasy of control of the color on the surface, the ink colonizes, does not sink in its subject, it overcomes it, erases it little by little and marks it of the seal of the absence. An intimate "adhesion" of the matters that one finds in his Films, the pages of newspapers unroll, by the only force of the liquid, drawing a line which comes to lacerate, as pushed by a clean life, the obscurity. From this silent deployment emerges a new narration where the meaning, no longer determined by the nature of the successive events, is subordinated to the temporality of their "occurrence".