Published 15 November 2021 in News
Abla Ababou Galerie
'Plural Matters'
Abla Ababou Galerie
57, avenue Mehdi Ben Barka, 10 000, Rabat-Souissi, Morocco
11 November 2021 - 12 January 2022
Participating artists: Karim Alaoui, Noureddine Amir, Mohammed Arrhioui, Morran Ben Lahcen, Itaf Benjelloun, Hamid Douieb, Mohamed El Mourid, Karim Marrakchi, Mohamed Mourabiti, Fatiha Zemmouri
From 12 November 2021 to 12 January 2022, ten artists dialogue around a common theme: matter. Between sculpture, weaving, collage, painting on glass and on canvas, the universes parade but are not alike.
Wool, glass, earth, clay, metal, skin, eggshells, canvas and paper, so many materials that ten artists have seized upon. To each his own technique. To each their own story. Noureddine Amir tells it with wool. He spins it, dyes it, tames it to make a disturbing sculpture of it. Between bust and dress, the imagination is racing. This same material that Morran Ben Lahcen magnifies in his sculptural paintings dominated by arborescent shapes and his favorite color: an intense and luminous orange. A light that Karim Marrakchi uses with poetry in his paintings on glass. Depending on the lighting, a whole profusion of details and dreamlike landscapes redraw and evolve, revealing a foretaste of lost paradise. Also sensual, Fatiha Zemmouri uses the earth to draw and engrave cracked, three-dimensional jars, in testimony of the fragility of matter and of a bygone era. A work that dialogues with the portraits of Mohammed El Mourid printed on animal skin. The faces of Moroccan rulers and women of the last century frozen on the skin call out. Bestiality or humanity? Memory or forgetfulness? A race in questioning constantly recalling the vulnerability of the man represented by Mohammed Arrhioui with his curled up silhouettes, encrusted with eggshells. As for Itaf Benjelloun, she prefers to make her character dance with fragments of objects to turn her back on suffering. A clever game of assembling different materials that Mohammed Mourabiti handles brilliantly to immerse us in landscapes where marabouts, satellite dishes and woman's breasts coexist. A reflection of our modern era littered with traces of the past. Omnipresent traces at Hamid Douieb who gives us in a single painting a superposition of several works ranging from drawing to painting through collage. And finally, Karim Alaoui offers to see male and female busts where the pangs of old age and the aestheticism of youth are engraved in the metal. More than a “plural materials” exhibition is a journey through shapes and colors.
For more information or to view the exhibition please navigate to the Abla Ababou Galerie website here