Hard Edge, Soft Core – Samir Mougas

Galerie Eric Mouchet is pleased to present the very first solo exhibition of French artist Samir Mougas in its Brussels space. Entitled Hard Edge, Soft Core, the exhibition brings together sculptures, ceramics and paintings, and marks a significant milestone in the artist’s career: it is the first time these different practices are shown simultaneously, revealing in full the coherence of a visual language that is both rich and singular.
 
Born in 1980, Samir Mougas has spent over twenty years developing a sculptural practice driven by an insatiable curiosity for everyday objects and technological imaginaries. His work draws from a deliberately eclectic visual repertoire — electronic music, science fiction, car tuning, industrial design — to produce works that resist easy categorisation. Each series reflects a constant appetite for shifting techniques and registers, from industrial foundry to glazed ceramics, from moulding to acrylic painting, resin and AI-assisted image generation.
 
At the heart of the exhibition, the eponymous series Hard Edge Soft Core (2019) brings together over twenty stoneware sculptures: car hubcaps cast in ceramic and covered in intense, unexpected glazes. These objects play on a tension that is constitutive of Samir Mougas’s work: on one side, the formal rigour inherited from serial, functional design; on the other, a material that remains organic, handcrafted, ambiguous. By transposing these anonymous roadside objects into the field of sculpture, he grants them a new presence — at once familiar and radically displaced.
 
This ambivalence extends into the large recent sculptures from the exhibition Intelligences ambiantes (CACN, Nîmes, 2023–2024), several monumental pieces of which are presented in Brussels: A technologic food distribution machine with an articulated arm distributing blue sauce, Wall-mounted hyper-technologic food distribution system, Incredibly complex wall-mounted machine to braid very long sausages for starving people, and A wall-mounted machine with a lot of components to distribute green and blue food and meals. Generated from prompts submitted to AI tools and then translated into volume by the artist — resin, polystyrene, wood, acrylic paint — these imaginary machine-sculptures evoke the assembly line, the food processor and alimentary dystopia all at once. Neither functional nor entirely fictional, they embody what the artist calls “decommissioned objects”: forms that already carry within them the idea of ruin and of a possible world.
 
The exhibition also features a group of paintings on canvas and paper made in 2021, including the series Human Experience: Spam Factory and works such as Last Flash, Genetic District, Timecode, Alerte bleu and Formes englouties. These works, with compositions animated by geometric forms and coloured circles on gridded backgrounds, extend the same formal obsessions onto the pictorial plane: seriality, repetition, the tension between the systematic and the sensory. Shown for the first time alongside the ceramics and large sculptures, they reveal the deep coherence of a practice that moves freely between media without ever being confined to any one of them.
 
Samir Mougas has taught painting and ceramics at EESAB Quimper since 2017. His work is held in several public and private collections, and has been the subject of critical texts by Jill Gasparina, Claire Kueny, Guilhem Monceaux and Bertrand Riou, among others. He has been represented by Galerie Eric Mouchet Paris/Brussels since 2016.