Achraf Touloub: By a ciphered fall

Public Gallery is pleased to present By a ciphered fall, the first UK solo exhibition by Achraf Touloub, whose practice confronts the collapse of figure and ground, tracing the fissures between subjective and objective realities. Touloub explores the mapping of perception itself – an infinite circuitry of mediation, representation and imagination that questions our place within an increasingly complex visual and technological paradigm. Touloub’s compositions hover between absolute resolution and glitch-induced instability, compelling the viewer to engage in a sustained trance, extending the process of visual calibration. The works oscillate in a state of vertigo – both in the traditional sense of freefall through an abyss of lost coordinates and as an unsettling stasis, a moment of ‘short-circuit’ in the technical and political visual system. Here, the viewer and the viewed are locked in an endless cycle of reflection and distortion. Like a system in constant flux, his work resists predictability, thriving on dizzying detours and reverberating echoes. These tensions speak to broader shifts in perception, knowledge, authority and witness in an era increasingly mediated by technology and artificial intelligence. If representation has long been tied to the Western project of quantifying reality, Touloub’s paintings push against this paradigm, suggesting an alternative dialectic – gestures not necessarily intended for human interpretation, but rather for an emerging non-human entity that perceives in ways we cannot yet grasp. His work does not merely depict but enacts – existing as both map and detour, within a system and as an anomaly – a representation that defies closure. Drawing inspiration from historical moments of cosmic alignment, Touloub examines thresholds where the visible and the invisible meet. Much like an eclipse, his works both obscure and reveal, asking what emerges when the known recedes into shadow. The exhibition positions painting as a site of emancipation – an encounter with the ghostly, a site where hallucination and perception collide. Achraf Touloub (b. 1986, Casablanca, Morocco) lives and works in Paris, France. Recent solo exhibitions include Metamorphosis Treatise, Parliament Gallery, Paris (2024); Assabīya, Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2022); Vies parallèles, Blank projects, Cape Town (2022); Les Arrivées, CAC Passerelle, Brest (2021); Achraf Touloub, Villa Medici, Rome (2020); and Discord Venue, Baronian Xippas, Brussels (2020). He has participated in group exhibitions at the Musée Départemental D’Art Contemporain Château De Rochechouart, Paris; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Cheongju; MRAC, Musée régional d’art contemporain, Sérignan; MCBA, Lausanne; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Permanent collections include the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt, Germany; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Foundation Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon, Annecy, France. Touloub was included in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kochi, India in 2016, the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, the Baltic Triennial 13 in Tallinn, Estonia in 2018.