Abdelkader Benchamma - Chourouk Hriech

Chourouk Hriech

Born in 1977, she lives in Marseille (France) and Rabat.

Abdelkader Benchamma

Born in 1975 in Mazamet (France), he lives and works in Paris and Montpellier (France).
 

The Espace des Arts de Colomiers is uniting two artists to whom drawing in black and white is a fundamental mode of expression. Chourouk Hriech, more urban, and Abdelkader Benchamma, more dreamlike, play an unexpected duet here that reveals as much their differences in approach and sensitivity as the astonishing vitality of this genre as old as art itself.

Abdelkader Benchamma

“Drawing helps me to be closer to my mental proliferations of scenarios, ideas, and images. It gives me the possibility of questioning and distorting the realities surrounding me in a poetic way.”

Chourouk Hriech

With his work involving clear lines, either in large formats or as mural works, his drawings are like re-compositions of images of landscapes, cities, and scenes of life, halfway between memory and document.

What does the festival’s subtitle “Here where I am doesn’t exist” mean to you?
Abdelkader Benchamma: It’s the kind of title I like. A title that’s trying to say something and which, at the same time, remains very blurred. It talks about shifting, mental and physical alike, and double displacement—I often find myself thinking about yesterday, or tomorrow, or next year. In fact I’m only rarely here, where I exist.

Chourouk Hriech: “Here where I am doesn’t exist” gives rise to an enigma, a race that has no finish… he encounter between “formal rigour and emotional density”; this interstice that Gilles Lapouge defines as the navigational space of piracy; a call to utopia, and things unrealized; an initiatory itinerary, an invitation to travel and suspension; the time of the passage from hand to head and paper, conveyed in a breath, a line, then another, which leads us to “an archipelago of imaginary places”… And a spring haiku, written looking at the landscape from my TGV [highspeed train] window on the Marseille-Mâcon line on 16 April 2008:

          From apricot trees
          Fall the bloodless petals
          Of a cruel winter.