Exhibition
À l'horizon, une obscure clarté
16 May 2024 – 29 Jun 2024
Regular hours
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 19:00
- Friday
- 10:00 – 19:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 19:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 19:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 19:00
Free admission
Address
- 7 rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth
- Paris
Île-de-France - 75003
- France
From 16 May to 29 June, AFIKARIS Gallery hosts – À l’horizon, une obscure clarté – Mouhcine Rahaoui’s (b. 1990, Morocco) first solo exhibition in France. In this new body of textured works, the artist explores the aesthetics of the miner and establishes their legend.
About
Mouhcine Rahaoui is part of these artists whose personal history informs his creative approach. His multi-dimensional works write a docu-fiction: between the reality of the coal mines and the tales that accompany them. Rahaoui is not a miner. His father used to be. Although he has never actually worked in the mines himself, the echoes and testimonies he grew up with have left a deep imprint on his visual practice. As a child of Jerada, a Moroccan mining town close to the Algerian border, he makes them his own, reincarnating the mines.
His solo exhibition - À l’horizon, une obscure clarté - testifies of a conceptual research around the mine.
Rahaoui portrays a reality that, in the imagination, belongs to a distant fable rather than to everyday life. He conveys feelings of dependence and risk combined with fascination and hope. While honouring the memory of the miner in the inevitability of their alienation from the earth, it underlines the movements of resistance and solidarity that reign in the face of adversity.
On the walls, Jerada’s face is fragmented. Everyday objects - shreds of bags that once contained bread and were then used to transport coal, candles and ropes - embody the geological layers through which the miners descend every day. Coal is omnipresent in his work, appearing not only as a subject but above all as a medium. It provides colour, texture and movement. It becomes pigment and protagonist, captured in a mixture of wax and glue or applied directly onto the surface of the canvas. In this exploration of matter, Rahaoui proposes a manifesto of instability, infused with an aesthetic of collapse and danger to embody the feeling of insecurity that emanates from the mine.