ABDELKADER BENCHAMMA

Overview

Abdelkader Benchamma (born 1975, Mazamet) lives and works between Paris and Montpellier, and studied Fine Art at Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Benchamma imposes constraints upon his process to create delicately executed and dynamic drawings of states of matter. His drawings take their inspiration from visual scenarios that stem from reflections on space and its physical reality, its limits and its zones of contact with mental space. They operate with diversions, modulating objects to testify for possible malfunctions in our relationship with the other and with things. Shifting of reality, intrusion of the invisible, indeterminate matters undergoing transformation, minuscule catastrophes are at the heart of Benchamma’s work.

Inspired by different thought processes that go from science to esotericism and from literature to history of art, the artist creates artworks with uncertain boundaries, the movement of which destabilises the visitor by playing with the codes of figuration and abstraction. These organic ensembles can make us think of landscapes, not in the traditional sense, but more because the flow they outline brings to mind the movement of natural elements like air, clouds, earth, space.

Moving matter that enveloped us at the Drawing Centre in New York (2015-2016), a cave animated by a furious circular vortex at the Sharjah Biennial (2017), these metaphysical installations question our relationship to what is imperceptible, infinite and invisible. He has had several solo exhibitions in prominent institutions such as Le Centquatre, Paris (2018) and Collection Lambert, Museed’Art Contemporain, Avignon (2021-2022) accompanied by a new 176 pages publication.

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