ART CITIES:Paris-Hicham Berrada
Strongly influenced by his background as both an artist and a scientist, Hicham Berrada combines intuition and knowledge, science and poetry. He explores scientific protocols that closely imitate various natural processes and/or climatic conditions. It is not about a representation of nature, but rather about nature being present and active in the majority of his works. Hicham employs a variety of media from photography, video and sculpture to installations and performance, which he names “chemical activations”.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie kamel mennour Archive
Combining the laboratory and the studio, chemical experiments and performances, Hicham Berrada creates a personal universe that plays on the codes and protocols of the experimental approach he adopts. The guiding principle of Hicham Berrada’s solo exhibition “Activations” at the galerie kamel mennour, is to make forms emerge, encourage them to appear rather than represent them. Hicham Berrada defines his practice as that of an energy director (in the sense one speaks of a stage director), whose creative gesture consists in a choice of physical and chemical parameters: to act on the temperature, the light, or the viscosity of an environment, so that, within a defined frame, something is produced. “I try to control the phenomena I enlist as a painter controls his pigments and paintbrushes. My pigments and paintbrushes are heat, cold, magnetism, light”. The performances in the series “Présage” are carefully composed chemical reactions, taking place within glass jars of acid mixed with water. Roughly translating into English as “premonition”, but with connotations of an endless loop of past and present, of images and matter, they are a powerful engagement with themes of creation and decay. Extensive research drew Berrada to use over 40 different chemicals in “Présage” each reacting in a unique way to the acidic environment. The bronzes from the series “Kéromancie”, with the wealth and diversity of their forms, are also a basis for the spectator’s capacities for interpretation and imagination, like three-dimensional Rorschach tests. Are they sculptures? Not in the classic sense of the word, since nothing has been sculpted or molded. Keromancy is a traditional divinatory art practiced since Antiquity, which consists in reading the future from the shapes taken by hot wax after it is thrown into water. The result depends on the composition of the wax, the temperature and pH of the water, and the movement with which the wax is immersed. Hicham Berrada has taken up this technique in an effort to control it: the wax is submitted to precise conditions in order to inflect the way its shapes develop. Controlling these parameters is an attempt to orient the future, to influence the course of events so that they become favorable to us. The best predictions are then cast in bronze with traditional lost-wax casting. The white sculpture, printed in 3D, is the first one of a series called “Augures mathématiques”. The work has been generated by combining different algorithms of morphogenesis, the study of the laws that determine natural forms. These algorithms have been determined by scientists, in order to give an account of the rules according to which organisms develop and take shape. Composed entirely of polygons, they are structured by a geometry so complex that it ends up appearing chaotic. Mathematic auguries simulate possibilities that outstrip our imagination, hybrids that exist or will perhaps exist, in other times or other places.
Info : Galerie kamel mennour, 6 rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris, Duration: 7/3-13/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 11:00-19:00, www.kamelmennour.com
