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From a semiotic point of view, art is an effect of meaning; the effect of art, the artistic seizure, is an aesthetic, affective, cognitive event, present in any work of art. This effect results from a process that we can reconstruct artistization. We must therefore circumscribe an object (the work), which induces an effect (art), by expressing a process (artistization). The pictorial work is therefore not limited to images: it is a composite semiotic object, a hybrid composed of process, supports, materials, energies, and everything that gives it a social and cultural mode of existence.
This is precisely the case with Mehdi Sahabi’s works; we cannot examine here the totality of what makes them works, and we will limit ourselves to the essential fact: a work, for Sahabi, is always a series, it is his way of making a work of art. We will therefore examine in his pictorial series (1) the characteristic tensions of the “new figuration”, and the manifestations of an inter-pictorial practice; (2) transverse isotopies and allotopias of serial and multilinear expression; (3) the work of pictorial layers and actantial strata, and the experimentation of imaginary dynamics. The artistization process, either for production or interpretation, is that of intuition (impression > synthesis > anagogy > imagination).