Hard Edge, Soft Core

The exhibition "Hard Edge, Soft Core" at Galerie Eric Mouchet in Brussels presents the first solo show of French artist Samir Mougas, featuring a collection of sculptures, ceramics, and paintings. This exhibition marks a significant moment as it displays these diverse practices together for the first time, highlighting the artist's unique and rich visual vocabulary. Mougas, born in 1980, draws inspiration from everyday objects and technological concepts, blending influences from electronic music, science fiction, car tuning, and industrial design.

The show includes the "Hard Edge Soft Core" series (2019), comprising over twenty glazed stoneware sculptures that are ceramic casts of car hubcaps, adorned with vibrant, unexpected glazes. These works explore the tension between the formal rigor of mass-produced design and the organic, artisanal quality of the material. Also featured are large-scale sculptures generated from AI prompts and translated into physical forms using resin, polystyrene, wood, and acrylic paint. These machine-like sculptures, described by the artist as "disused objects," evoke assembly lines, kitchen robots, and food dystopias. The exhibition is rounded out by paintings from 2021, including the "Human Experience: Spam Factory" series, which visually echo the formal obsessions of seriality and the interplay between the systematic and the sensitive found in his sculptures.