“I found it on Google!” Dublin-born Egyptian artist Rafik Greiss Happy to explain when I praise La Maison, the cafe we chose to meet in Paris Fashion’s 17th Annual Ardissements. At one of our winter Mondays intersections, Greiss on his way to his storage unit, I headed to a faculty meeting, and when you’re “between studios,” the café offers an alternative to studio visits, although immersing in public spaces is a sign of artist practice. “I did a lot of work outside of the studio and I realized I used it primarily for storage. Do I even want a studio?”
Last year, Greiss was preparing for the solo exhibition “Longest Sleep” at Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris, he shared a space with international artist Pol Taburet, a painter who lives in Poush. “I love bounce back with other artists, and it’s great to have a community,” Greiss explained. However, his work spreads a painful sense of loneliness: photos of ropes drawn around wooden frames of upright pianos, a series of discovered objects read as artifacts of night pilgrimage.
Works by Rafik Greiss in the 2025 “Uncurrent” exhibition, in Berlin’s Galerie Molitor and LC Queisser.
Slowly, the sound of the ambient rises from the basement, emanating from Greiss’ new film, who realizes it’s what he realizes during many nights he spends with Walis or Sufi Saints. He made a 12-minute movie. The longest sleep (2024), last year in Cairo. Its slow carousel and a series of acrobatics lures the Sophie-style ceremony to celebrate Wallis’s birthday, reminding me of the scene of James Baldwin’s threshing floor. But Greiss’s reference to Andrew Newberg’s neurology: “Studying how the brain works in religion.” Greiss did not grow up in a religious family, but was “always interested in the way people think. I feel that all religions are in the face of this fear of death.”
Rafik Greiss: LèvresFroides (mold cover), 2024.
Photos Aurélienmole/ courtesy of Balice Hertling in Paris;
When the waiter put Greiss’ tea on our table (Lemon Verbena, good for insomnia), he turned the 15-inch screen of the 2016 Macbook Pro toward me (“This is my studio!”), sharing images of recent works. have LèvresFroides (mold cover)In 2024, he sent back a pair of slender doors from his residence in Tbilisi. They carry dusty footprints, like ghosts. At Balice Hertling, he hangs them on the wall.
Greiss printed his black and white photos. He shoots low, and in the distance, his image is like flashing in a dream. His Japanese paper uses thick paper and points out their textured edges, a way to emphasize artistic signatures in lens-based practice. Greiss’s shock to the city’s architecture, the rotten interior and the vision of a lonely figure without a certain location or details of the person, blurring in the run, forming a portrait of his wild, wandering eyes.
Currently, Greiss has made an invitation to the exhibition in an institution near the Mediterranean Basin. “Once I sold my work from my last show, I would travel. I did a lot of work while traveling because everything was so new to me, and different stimuli went into my brain.” A week later, when I emailed him to ask if he decided to be at his destination, his answer was Egypt. “There is a very primitive connection to urban space.”
