Abdelkader Benchamma
Cosma
For his third solo exhibition at TEMPLON, Abdelkader Benchamma is unveiling a series of drawings, paintings and wall installations produced during his residency at Palazzo Butera in Palermo in conjunction with the Institut Français.
Cosma – Symétrie – Magma
During his residency, the artist adopted a new approach to a subject he has been interested in for several years: the Cosmati, the singular use of marble which, fragmented in marquetry or when positioned symmetrically in Italian churches, play with our contemporary codes of representation in an uncanny manner. The forms created by these mineral veins appear to be neither figurative nor abstract, but evolve instead in a mysterious place between the two.
Are they an esoteric system of representation that has been handed down through the centuries and survived until the present day
Could they be the ancestors of the Rorschach test where the anxieties of the Middle Ages were projected? Are they an attempt to give shape to the things that cannot be represented? The theories that abound open up a whole array of fascinating avenues the artist explores in his drawings.
In Palermo, Abdelkader Benchamma worked on numerous large-scale works where brown, ochre and violet mineral tones infiltrate the drawing, playing with our beliefs and our memories. Caught up in a profusion of details, amongst the different layers, miraculous and disconcerting scenes concealed, are they dreamlike or pareidolia?
The strange magma drawn by Abdelkader Benchamma escapes from the paper and invades the space, forming a sediment on the walls and turning the gallery into a landscape that evokes now a Baroque church, now a primal memory.
The artist
Born in 1975 in Mazamet (France), Abdelkader Benchamma lives and works in Paris and Montpellier.
A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Montpellier and the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, his preferred medium is drawing.
Nourished by literature, philosophy and astrophysics, his drawn installations continually challenge exhibition spaces, becoming, in his words, “spaces of resonance”, conducive to the summoning of memories, both individual and collective, geological and spiritual.
His vast ephemeral frescoes are painted directly onto walls with ink, transforming architecture into an otherworld, a world of flux and mental landscapes, between the recognizable and the indiscernible, on the border between the physical and the symbolic. Reflecting on the workings of perception, his works explore our systems of knowledge, the survival of myths and beliefs, but also reminiscences, retinal or neuronal persistence, whether on museum walls or sheets of paper.
