Curated by Sandra Patron & Clément Nouet
For his first solo exhibition in a French museum, Abdelkader Benchamma invests three rooms at Mrac Occitanie in an immersive installation that operates a network of echoes and resonances with his residence at the Villa Medici, produced in the fall of 2018 as part of the first Prize Occitanie - Médicis.
For the past ten years, Abdelkader Benchamma has made himself known by developing a virtuoso practice of drawing, in an enlarged conception which is deployed at the scale of the places that welcome him. Inspired as much by literature and astrophysics as by philosophy and esotericism, Abdelkader Benchamma's drawings give shape to the informal, creating doubt about the reality of our perceptions. Unstable universes, made of vortices, collisions and sedimentation, evoke in turn a vortex, a cave in transformation or a cosmos that one would try to decipher in the manner of a Rorschach test. The exhibition becomes the field of materials in tension, borrowing its lexicon and its network of forces from the field of physics: movement, conflict, resolution, evaporation, solidification, disappearance.
