ART CITIES:Paris-Hicham Berrada

For his exhibition, Hicham Berrada transforms the space into a sensorial landscape. The temperature, the light and dark, the blue sky and the night, the images and scents of flowers all appear and steal away, fade and spread, immersing the visitor in a unique experience. This scripted environment at the crossing of science and poetry, of intuition and knowledge, is based on an inverted temporal mechanism, the artist upsets the climatic conditions and the circadian rhythm of plants to create three landscapes, “Azur”, “Céleste” and “Mesk-ellil”.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kamel Mennour Gallery Archive

The Marroquin artist Hicham Berrada stages chemically activated changes and metamorphoses in his work, in so doing, he invites the visitor to experience the energies and forces emanating from the matter he utilizes. At the Villa Medici at Rome, he extended his research by creating enclosed worlds from elemental matter and bits of landscape from ore. We can see the results of this work in “Azur”, a suite of canvases bathed in cobalt that explores changes in the ore’s state. In a blue light, he devises a chiaroscuro garden where nature presents itself to us in the darkness and secretly releases its subtle scents. This botanical theater in which nature and artifice mingle takes the form of a glass pavilion with alleys of mesk-ellil. This delicate flower, this five-petal star, displays its white beauty in the day. At night, in the blue of the evening, it opens, straightens up, and emits its ester. Indeed, each contributes to constitute the other. The humidity emanating from the plants below acts on the environment of “Azur” and the heat from the paintings above affects the garden in turn. The artist continues to focus on this mysterious unity of matter and the heavens in the video “Céleste”. A thick blue smoke constituted of refined ore takes flight, moves about, and melts into a gray sky. Light is given body, the sky is colored. A fragment of blue sky gradually appears…

Info:”Circadian Landscapes”, kamel mennour Gallery, 6 rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris, Duration: 27/3-135/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 11:00-19:00, www.kamelmennour.com