Montpellier’s Abdelkader Benchamma invents parallel worlds at the Lambert Collection in Avignon
This virtuoso of contemporary drawing, passionate about esotericism and science, exhibited until February 20, 2022.
He is the most prominent Montpellier artist today. Abdelkader Benchamma benefits from an exhibition at the Lambert Collection in Avignon, along with a publication at Actes Sud (“Rayon Fossile”). In galleries, his works travel from Brussels to Barcelona, soon to Toronto.
In Paris, it is the renowned Daniel Templon who represents him. And in Montpellier, he carried out a large order, a ceiling for the Richer de Belleval hotel. At 46 years old, the native of Mazamet has accomplished a sacred journey with the queen but rare technique of drawing which he involves in a very contemporary aesthetic.
“Christian Laune, my teacher at the Montpellier School of Fine Arts, pushed me in this direction. Everyone around me painted, and I preferred to draw, permanently. It was inexpensive and I continue to nurture my creativity “. The young Benchamma continued his studies at the fine arts in Paris.
His first drawings combine American comics and repetitive writing that becomes graphic, as with Williams Burroughs, of which he is an avid reader. Passionate about SF, the discovery in adolescence of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 A Space Odyssey” was a revelation. “I perceived that it was not a simple film but an object of art “.
The black monolith will become one of the signs of his very personal imagination, crossing the fantastic and the sciences with metaphysical questions. He also remembers the luminous door of the Night of Destiny, which he awaited with excitement and anxiety, in a childhood steeped in Muslim culture.
Exhibited by Agnès B
At the turn of the 2000s, Abdelkader Benchamma sent a sketchbook to the stylist Agnès B who supported young artists. She exposes it and edits it. The book “This is where we put the titles” reveals fragmentary scenes of everyday life exploring the meaning of the absurd and the notion of space.
Benchamma, who favors black and white, already plays with the voids of the paper, the figurative and the abstract, the real and the fictitious, natural landscapes and mental landscapes, the blurring of perception.
Ink, ballpoint pencil or charcoal, he quickly tries out all formats, without fear of the monumental, the mural, helped by an increasingly virtuoso technique, speed of execution and endurance of a Benedictine monk. Because with him the infinitely large is born from the infinitely small.
The marbles of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul inspire a series of drawings, sumptuous like paintings, evoking phantasmagorical geological sections, “metaphors of memory “. That of the big bang resonates in “Rayon Fossile”, the Avignon exhibition where recent productions include older works to constitute unique and ephemeral works.
Battle of Los Angeles
“The Battle of Los Angeles”, a strafing of UFOs by the US military in 1942, is the theme of another series with explosive compositions.
Benchamma is passionate about “the moments when the real cracks allowing another reality to emerge “. His “Engrams”, a memory base that induces neurological connections, delve into the complexity of the brain.
The unconscious also guides the author of a “Dream Book”, a demiurge inventing these parallel worlds which follow one another in the rooms of the Lambert Collection. Black and white kaleidoscopic visions punctuated with rare touches of color. “Black and white facilitate abstraction “. This mysterious radiance which irrigates his work.