MCC Gallery

CHARADES

– Solo show
curated by Simon Njami

Marrakech
– 19.11.2022 – 20.03.2023

This is both a process and an experiment which result is not meant to be the final goal.

The art of an artist like Yassine Balbzioui requires a total adequation between works and space, a symbiosis between inspiration and its activation.

Here is, in few words, the adventure of which different moments are going to be unveiled progressively until the apex that is usually known as the opening.

Simon Njami

In this new body of work , Moroccan artist Yassine Balbzioui creates a surreal world exploring both play and danger. On the borders that paradoxically separate fictional reality and oniric truth, Balbzioui invents hybrid characters that remind us of the incredible fate of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis…

Balbzioui’s work develops around different axes: essentially painter and draftsman, he develops, in a neo-expressionist vein, a production of great formal and semantic richness, in which the representation of human animality, most often under cover of the mask, crosses the notions of derision, idiocy, the grotesque, apprehended as artistic postures.

Galerie Shart

Ermites – Solo show

Casablanca
– 14.10 – 20.11.2021

Intitulée « Ermites » l’exposition des travaux récents de l’artiste plasticien Yassine Balbzioui est essentiellement composée de peintures et d’une sculpture en bronze.

Ce titre paradoxal, un ermite par définition ne pouvant vivre que seul, est le résultat d’une réflexion de l’artiste sur l’idée utopique de vivre simultanément en ermite et collectivement, un regard philosophique en référence à ce monde d’aujourd’hui où les informations contradictoires sont constantes.

Avec une palette de verts profonds traités comme un appel vers les grands espaces de dame Nature, Yassine Balbzioui invite, dans une veine néo-expressionniste, ses personnages à un huis clos à la fois psychodramatique et drôle.

Parfois adultes, parfois enfants, ces « Ermites » jouent et surjouent la partition d’une folie tranquille, responsables et irresponsables, seuls et ensembles, joyeux et mélancoliques, toujours silencieux et profondément touchants, peuplant un scénario imaginaire pensé par l’artiste comme la trame d’un film extravagant et intimiste, une suite dans la recherche constante et la réflexion de Yassine Balbzioui sur les solitudes de l’humain dans les sociétés contemporaines.

Amidst a verdant tropical landscape, a man sits astride an inflatable pink flamingo as if he were floating on a swimming pool and yet, there’s no water in sight. Mystery, deception and play are at the centre of Morocco-based artist Yassine Balbzioui’s surreal painted scenes. For his latest exhibition, Funny Games at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery Berlin, he presents a powerful new body of work that explores a curious liminal space between humour and danger, reality and dream.

The exhibition borrows its title from Austrian screenwriter and filmmaker Michael Haneke’s 1997 psychological thriller, which similarly to Balbzioui’s paintings, blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. In the film, two young men hold a family hostage and torture them with sadistic games in their holiday home, frequently breaking down the fourth wall by addressing the camera so that audience becomes witness. Although Balbzioui does not depict horror or violence, he is interested in how the torturers’ restlessness is linked to a certain nostalgia in the sense that their “games” mimic childlike behaviour. In the making of art, the artist seeks to also enter a childlike state that brings with it a greater level of creative freedom, innocence and excitement that’s then filtered through an adult perspective.

Balbzioui seeks to approach each painting with fresh eyes by playing with different artistic mediums and modes of investigation. To create the Red Horse paintings, for example, the artist built a model as a kind of stage set which he photographed and altered on Photoshop, before finally transferring the scene onto two canvases that show alternative perspectives. Similarly, the repetitive figures in the works entitled Three Accordions and Zebra Flowers were originally composed using Photoshop to evoke the idea of a digital glitch, which is then translated into the medium of painting. This layered process adds a sense of dynamism to the work, which is also felt through the rough, urgent brushstrokes and blurring of colours.

Balbzioui has said before that his paintings “are a resistance against the banality of the world” and in this sense, Funny Games is perhaps best understood and appreciated as a deliberate attempt to destabilise the image in order to access a more liberated creative experience for both artist and viewer.

https://kristinhjellegjerde.com