Curated by Katherine Sirois, the exhibition presents about 30 unpublished works that reflect one of the lesser-known aspects of the artist's visual universe: his strong connection to music.
Through a dense and cohesive body of work, linked by means of a creative and performative pictorial act that addresses emblematic elements of the Action Painting movement, the exhibition proposes to undo the frictions and fiction imprinted on individual and collective identities, bringing together and celebrating aesthetic knowledge and epistemologies from Africa and the African diaspora, but also from Europe.
"Because “Pulsation” relates to expansion-contraction dynamics, it primarily conjures up the ideas of repetition and continuity. These notions are explicitly translated here with the conception-production of the works into a mostly uniform ensemble. But it is also reflected by the performative application of a one-colour graffiti that is running over the 33 paintings produced for this exhibition. As typical taggers do on city walls or railway cars with their designed signatures and pseudonyms, the artist drew a continuous red line along with a series of successive letters and words, thus bonding each piece to one another. To conduct the ongoing graffiti upon the whole series, Vidal laid the works on the ground, bearing in mind the traditional technique used by Native Americans, which was later endorsed by emblematic artists from the Action Painting movement."
- Katherine Sirois (Curator)
