Caput Mundi

The Locker Room, in collaboration with Deep Feelings and Sophie Szpalski, presents Caput Mundi, a solo exhibition by Paris-based artist Chemsedine Herriche, curated by Hannah Kreile. The exhibition marks Herriche’s solo debut in New York. Caput Mundi brings together a new body of work created for the occasion: paintings on satellite dishes, windshields, limestone blocks, and, for the first time, a series on wooden icon boards crafted in an atelier in Italy. Herriche’s enduring fascination with painting and the Old Masters has led him to develop his signature airbrush technique, rooted in sfumatoand chiaroscuro, layering pigments with remarkable precision until forms seem to emerge and recede within the same breath. Herriche’s vocabulary of materials and forms, and their repurposing or subversion, originates in and returns to his childhood. He grew up in a house in constant renovation, where the only fixed element was the satellite dish beaming images of Algerian football matches into the night. That luminous screen became, for his uprooted father, a portal to his native land. In Arabic, the word for parabole, qamas sinai, literally translates as “artificial moons.” It has become a totemic object for Herriche, recurring throughout his work as a symbol of both connection and control, linking distant worlds while exposing the hierarchies that govern the circulation of images. The title Caput Mundi recalls the Latin phrase “center of the world,” once used to describe Rome and, by extension, every city that claimed dominance; yet phonetically, it also echoes kaputt, the German word for “broken.” Between grandeur and fracture, Herriche’s paintings trace a world still orbiting the illusion of a center, even as that center erodes.