DOUGLAS GORDON'S ZIDANE FILM OPENS AT GAGOSIAN LA JULY 16

Thursday, July 16, six to eight in the evening, Gagosian's Beverly Hills space goes dark for a reception built around one work. On two adjacent screens, a man in the white shirt of Real Madrid drifts through grass turned faintly blue by color correction, tracked by seventeen synchronized cameras that never once cut away to follow the ball. The exhibition is called Magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all, and its thesis is blunt. Twenty years on, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait still says more about fame than any highlight reel does.

Seventeen Cameras Chase One Player for Ninety Minutes

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is a double screen film Douglas Gordon made with Philippe Parreno in 2006, and Gagosian's Beverly Hills gallery is the venue this time. Seventeen cameras were positioned around the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium in Madrid to shoot a single La Liga match, Real Madrid against Villarreal, on April 23, 2005, and every one of them stayed locked on Zinedine Zidane for the full ninety minutes. The ball leaves the frame constantly. Zidane does not. Critics have connected the method to Andy Warhol's screen test portraits and, further back, to the fixed gaze of a Goya or Velazquez court painting, work that treats a single face as worth an entire canvas.

Mogwai Scored a Match Gordon Did Not Direct

Gordon asked the Scottish band Mogwai to build the soundtrack, and the choice explains why an art gallery, not a sports bar, is the right home for this film. The track moves between long stretches of near silence, just cleats on grass and Zidane's own breathing picked up by a directional mic, and sudden swells that swallow the stadium's seventy two thousand voices whole. It is a rock band scoring a football match the way a film composer scores a thriller, building dread around a man who is, for most of the ninety minutes, simply walking. The Jennifer Guidi show Gagosian just opened in Paris proves the gallery is comfortable letting sound and color carry a room in place of a story, and this film is the same bet made two decades earlier.

April 23, 2005: The Night Zidane Saw Red

The match Gordon and Parreno chose to film is not a random one. Late in that same game, Zidane was sent off for his part in a scuffle, meaning the cameras that were built to study his stillness ended up capturing the exact opposite, his ejection, in real time. It is an odd rehearsal for the moment football actually remembers him for, the headbutt on Marco Materazzi in the 2026 anniversary FO already covered in Zidane's white jersey, twenty years after the headbutt, which happened at the World Cup final a little over a year after this Bernabéu match was shot. One film watches him almost lose his temper. The other watches him lose it completely.

Farsi, Armenian, Korean, Chumash: The Neon Speaks Los Angeles

The film is not the whole show. Gagosian is also hanging Meaning and Location, a 1990 vinyl text piece, and Tears are not Enough, a 2023 neon work, with several of Gordon's language pieces rendered specifically in Armenian, Farsi, Korean and Chumash, the language of the Indigenous people native to the Los Angeles basin. That is a curatorial choice, not a default. It ties a film about a French Algerian player representing Spain's biggest club to a city whose own population speaks in exactly those tongues, during a summer when World Cup matches are being played a few miles from the gallery.

Gagosian Does Not Take Sport Seriously by Accident

The show marks twenty five years since Gordon's first Los Angeles survey, at MOCA in 2001, and Gagosian is not staging that anniversary quietly. Timing a Zidane film to a World Cup summer, with matches held in the same city as the gallery, is a placement decision as much as a curatorial one, a bet that a nineteen year old football film still reads as contemporary art rather than nostalgia. The show runs through August 22. Two facts settle it. Seventeen cameras once followed a man who could not stay calm for ninety straight minutes, and twenty five years after his last Los Angeles show, Gordon is still the artist a gallery reaches for when it wants sport to look like art instead of highlights.