Hicham Berrada (*1986 in Morocco) lives and works in Paris and Lille.
The works of Hicham Berrada are weaving an elaborate tapestry between science and poetry. They make use of scientific parameters to reveal the universal magic of our daily lives, intricately choreographing a complex dance between chemical particles and physical reactions. It is not about a representation of nature, but rather about nature being present and active in the majority of his works. Hicham employs a variety of media from photography, video and sculpture to installations and performance (which he nicknames “chemical activations”). He has reinterpreted our assumptions of what a painting is: instead of the naked canvas, he takes reality, while replacing paint and brush with physical elements.
His well-known Présage series brings together aquatic landscapes chemically activated in glass tanks like hermetic little worlds cut from our own. Worlds made out of minerals immersed in an aqueous solution, with the artist deploying a whole range of components according to the colours and shapes he hopes to bring into existence.
These landscapes are also modulated by being shown in different ways, each of which has it’s own temporality: quick and rhythmic for the performances and the videos, drawn-out and slow-tempoed for the tanks. The video performances screend live allow us to watch the landscape in the making: the artist is working on the source of the image by triggering reactions inside a beaker, but at the same time on its setting, by choosing the camera’s focus and angle, and the speed of the beaker as it revolves on a motorised turntable. The rectangular tanks are placed against the walls of the exhibition; they cannot be moved without entailing their destrucion. Their shape is similar to that painted or photographed landscape, the difference being that the landscapes in the tanks envolve slowly and constantly.
The Présage summon us to see inorganic matter in a different light. We habitually think of the minderal world as a static, as opposed to the animate living world. We are unable to perceive the movement of the mineral because its temporality far outstrips our own, but the subjecting purified minerals to particular pH and viscosity conditions we discover the metamorphoses of substances we normally consider inert and immutable. In the situations set up by the artist the mineral world even turns out to have a gestural dimension, to be capable of movements we thought the prerogative of living systems.
