FATA BROMOSA, 2019
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.
One of the challenges of his work then seems to make the visible invisible, the figurative abstract and the obvious enigmatic. But what is striking at first glance in his work is the power with which he summons the spectator, his retina, his body and his emotions. This work literally grabs us, the oscillation of the drawing becomes an integral part of our relationship to it, even though, jostled, carried away, we do not know whether we are immersed in the infinitely large or the infinitely small. This disturbance is materially replayed by the artist in a very specific relationship to the exhibition space. In this, he is inspired by the theory of the genesis of forms of Albert the Great in the 13th century, in which the philosopher makes the postulate that forms do not content themselves with inhabiting a place but that they are produced by it. It is in the place that the power of matter manifests itself, its appetite to determine itself as form. Abdelkader Benchamma's wall drawings play with this power, this genius of the place and to the extent that they are led to disappear at the end of the exhibition, they also create an analogy with the fleeting and elusive character of the existing. .
It is therefore not surprising that the artist's stay in Rome at the Villa Medici was particularly prolific and inspiring for him. In Rome, Abdelkader Benchamma is fascinated by the variety and richness of the decorations of the churches, and in particular by the use of certain marbles, which by a play of symmetry of veins, create abstract forms which are nevertheless charged symbolically and spiritually. . This is the moment when he immerses himself in reading the work of a former resident of the Villa Medici, Georges Didi-Huberman (1984-86). In his work “Dissimilarity and Figuration”, the historian and philosopher analyzes the painting of the Italian artist of the Quattrocento Fra Angelico, and particularly his use of false marbles. These indeterminate and abstract figures that are revealed in certain frescoes by Fra Angelico would be a way for the artist to make the unrepresentable and the invisible appear. The divine is revealed by stigmata, so many stains and traces that Fra Angelico affixes to the very surface of the false marbles.
To appear without representing, this seems to be the ambition that certain Renaissance painters, from which Abdelkader Benchamma was inspired: that the drawing becomes the imprint of a beyond, that it is an emanation of nature, but another nature, interior and infigurable.
The title of the exhibition, Fata Bromosa , (literally Fairy of the Mists) refers in an incomplete way to this scrambling of perception dear to Fra Angelico. The term evokes an optical phenomenon observed by navigators in the Middle Ages and is materialized by a superposition of mirages which gives the impression of a fog with luminous edges. The images observed are thus amplified and distorted in a spectacular way, strange shapes become perceptible at the level of the horizon.
At Mrac Occitanie, Abdelkader Benchamma brings together all these issues and establishes a dialogue between recent pieces and new productions, all reconfigured at the scale of the place. In a first space, the artist creates a series of paintings on paper inspired by these symmetrical marbles. For the artist, these forms that appear in these compositions are neither more nor less than the ancestor of the Rorschach test, but applied to a space devoted to belief that plunged the believer into a receptive state, where altered perceptions could occur. In a jubilant relationship with the material which is customary to him, Abdelkader Benchamma creates his drawings in a wide variety of techniques and mediums: the aerosol spray rubs shoulders with delicate felt, and copper-based paints, silver or aluminum create a play of correspondences with the materials used by the alchemists of the Middle Ages. In a second more intimate space, the artist offers a set of old and new works around the notion of miracles and wonders. These drawings, inspired by myths and legends found in old engravings but also on the internet, ask us about these symbolic images that have shaped a collective imagination that tends to disappear. Their persistence and survivals are now available in other forms, particularly on the internet, where they give rise to many rumors and conspiracy theories. In a final space, Abdelkader Benchamma offers a monumental drawing on the ground, overflowing on the walls, oscillating between an installation of strange carpets and a constellation of mosaics, like a ruined mineral landscape. Playing on the revelation of forms and images of places of worship, he here calls upon another physical relationship to drawing, more immersive, always with this questioning on the relationship between images and our regimes of belief in the background.
* The Occitanie - Médicis Prize: As part of its cultural policy, the Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée Region created the Occitanie - Médicis Prize in February 2018 in partnership with the Académie de France in Rome - Villa Médicis. This prize aims to promote and support artists from Occitania on the international scene. With 115 applications received, the first edition bears witness to the diversity and artistic richness present in Occitania. Abdelkader Benchamma was chosen as the winner of the 1st edition of the Prix Occitanie - Médicis in February 2018. The artist benefited from a 3-month stay in residence at the Villa Médicis at the end of 2018 and a scholarship awarded by the Occitanie Region. His exhibition at Mrac Occitanie completes this unprecedented support for artists living in the region.