The plastic artist M’barek Bouhchichi is taking over the L’Atelier 21 art gallery in Casablanca for the second time, from March 23 to April 26, 2021, for an exhibition called The Silent Mirror.
This exhibition is based on the representation and perception of the black body in Moroccan society. In this regard, the art writer Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa specifies in the exhibition catalog: “The works in this exhibition are conceived both as a response to the differentiation and alteration of the black body and as an attempt reassessment of the means of its representation, through techniques and creative protocols implemented to expose the logic of the construction of the portrait ”.
And to add: “Molded, sculpted, drawn, painted, the body is highlighted through a kaleidoscope of signs, fragments (almost votive) and images which show the multiple or the exploded. Hands, heads, faces, imprints become metaphors, doubles – even linings – of invisible bodies that struggle to make one. They refer to the fragmentation of the human body and the shattering of perception, thus assigning to the viewer the responsibility of reconstituting the many imaginary and symbolic meanings of the image of the shattered body, or of getting lost in the opacity of a such fragmentation ”.
Born in 1975 in Akka, M’barek Bouhchichi holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts, he has been teaching art since the mid-1990s in Tiznit and Tahannaout. The research on empty and full spaces, and the importance of the gesture, which characterized his beginnings as an abstract painter, are the foreshadowing of his current work.
M’barek Bouhchichi’s works have an undeniable autobiographical component. Through painting, drawing, installation or video, the artist formulates aesthetic proposals, intimately linked to his experience and the experience of those close to him.
Little inclined to seduce the retina, the art of Bouhchichi presents one of the most interesting and contemporary plastic experiences in Morocco. M’barek Bouhchichi provides proof that the beautiful arises fiercely when the artist makes skin with his works.
