On April 23rd tAbdelkader Benchammahe first solo show in Italy of artist Abdelkader Benchamma (Mazamet, 1975) opens at Federico Luger Gallery.
All this mass are just pieces from the same part could have been the words pronounced by the great master Frenhofer to the dismayed Porbus and Poussin upon showing them his unknown masterpiece.
The contrast between the vision of the work as a whole and the single fragments that compose it is the leitmotiv of Benchamma’s works that, just like in Honoré de Balzac’s story, has the aim of revealing the uncontrollable beauty of feverish fragmentality.
The artist, especially in his latest cycle of works, further forces his graphic technique in the creation of new realms that leave the viewer uncertain about the nature of what he is contemplating. These are creations that simultaneously come from various places: mental spheres that alternate with infinitesimal landscapes taken, perhaps, from the lens of a microscope or, ad absurdum, painted as backgrounds from orbital stations that silently scrutinize us from beyond.
The sense of unreality is amplified thanks to the relationship between the figure and the background, where the latter is very often left blank: an invading white that defines the suspended representations in a place where the traditional rules of perspective are no longer a sufficient device to correctly decipher the whole.
Contemplating Benchamma’s works we come across continual surprises: nocturnal explosions that transform what could seem an ordinary hill covered in trees, or like in Tas (2009) where what we see is precisely the mass refered to in the title, yet we do not understand to which kingdom it belongs, whether animal, mineral or vegetable.
In some of the compositions even the few figurative glimpses vanish, the elements that could yet be useful for an analysis and they remain only as abstractions gone crazy, propagated into the space by violent deflagrations. Even when the human figure is present, like in Les premiers (2009), such reference, nevertheless, does not in the least help reveal the place nor the context that involves the portrayed multitude, leaving us bewildered by a convulsive crowd and perhaps it too is unaware.
Regardless being created by using a “traditional” technique, ink on paper, the works reveal a fragmentary reality that perfectly mirrors the explosive discontinuity of contemporary life, an existence that is recognized more and more in a series of images becoming a puzzle difficult to solve.
Through his artistic search Benchamma seems to recall André Breton’s foreboding sentence: “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”
Press Release
Federico Luger presents
Abdelkader Benchamma
“All this mass are just pieces from the same part”
Opening: Thursday April 23 at 7:00 p.m.
From April 24 until May 22, 2009
Federico Luger
Via Domodossola 17 (interno) 20145 Milano
Tel: +39 02 67391341
info@federicoluger.com www.federicolugergallery.com