The “inhabited” Work and the Art of Transposition

By Florence Renault

Spring 2007 | Gallery

Younès Rahmoun has set up shop. The space is cramped, barely more than a cubic meter. This is his studio, the Ghorfa. (1) It is in this empty space, under the staircase of his family home, that the artist conceives, develops, sketches, and finally designs the installations that will only take shape fully at the moment of their exposition. (2)

The works of Younès Rahmoun are the product of an exceptionally painstaking and rigorous process. Nothing in the Ghorfa evokes the traditional clichés of the artist’s studio. Rather, everything is carefully organized and classified: works in process, future works, archived works, ideas for new works .This precision and orderliness are, of course, imposed to some degree by the workspace that the artist has both adapted (as the only space available for his work) and appropriated (because it reflects his own thought processes), and they find an echo in the work itself. Eventually he will, after spending seven years (1998-2005) conceiving of new works in this “booth,” turn the space into an installation in its own right, transposing the architecture of his studio to a scale model one-twentieth its actual size. (3) In so doing, he inverts a process that recurs frequently in his own work, as he is regularly called upon to transpose the reduced scale of the A4 sheet of paper to the dimensions of an actual installation, or to transpose the bidimensional nature of his designs to a tridimensional exposition space. It is a task that bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the architect.

While still a student at the Fine Arts School of Tétouan, Younès Rahmoun was fashioning small houses out of haystacks. (4) For his final project, he chose to exhibit his work in a traditional house, joining the empty spaces of the architectural interior with his own works. (5) These explorations of architectural form took on a new dimension with pieces like “Tamathoul” (6) and “W’hida-W’hida,” (7) which examine the interplay of full and empty space in the context of openings, like doors open or closed to the world, and which foreground the minimalist appearance, the scarcity of resources, the repetition of forms, and the use of “poor” materials that characterize all the artist’s works.

The question of method is undoubtedly central to Younès Rahmoun’s work, but his elaboration of craft, however scientific and rigorous it may be, ultimately draws on a far more immaterial universe. There is nothing gratuitous or haphazard in the artist’s work, from his choices of form, color and material, to the number and arrangement of elements, to the orientation of the various pieces in space. For each work is more a product of meditation than of sudden inspiration, and each pattern, each association of objects, speaks more to a mystical realm than to simple, formal artifice.

Thus, the work “Subha,” (8) a luminous spiral (with more than a passing resemblance to the Arab-Muslim arabesque) composed of 99 light bulbs individually enshrouded in white fabric, concerns itself as much with the recurrent symbolism of numbers (9), colors, and materials as with the evocation of the form and motion of our galaxy. It is a work that transcends its origins in the personal spiritual quest of the artist to explore questions of universal culture. Beneath the sober exterior of this “enlightened” spiral lies a complex and somewhat mysterious work, a metaphor for the “inhabitant” of the human soul. It is, in any case, an extension of the artist’s personal universe, from the method to the form that it produces, from the conceptualization of the work to the exercise of its realization. There is a transposition from life to work (and back again!), expressed as a kind of “interior necessity,” in Younès Rahmoun’s work. The small, ephemeral “Sitta,” (10) which he created while being detained in a camp in the south of France, (11) is a vibrant reflection of this. During those six days, he spent his daily hour of outdoor exercise gathering the rare white stones that he found mixed in with the black gravel of the yard, creating a “little mountain” of white against the dark earth—no doubt a way of signaling his presence in this place, just as his frequent use of the shroud evokes death in order to bring to the fore the value of human existence in its most refined form.

If the artist draws the elements of his works from his lived experience, his daily life, his beliefs and his culture, he does so in order to draw out their formal potential and to explore their cultural resonance, to re-visit their symbolic aspects and transpose them, like so many milestones, invisible but perceptible landmarks, in his work.

Florence Renault, Casablanca, February 10, 2007

Footnotes:

1. Tr. “Little Room”

2. Cf. the film Ahad (tr. “Sunday” and “unique”) by Eymeric Bernard, based on the artist and his studio—2003.

3. “Al Ana Huna” (tr. “Here Now”), Appartement 22, Rabat —2005.

4. “Temmoun” (tr. “Haystacks”), rural Tétouan—1996.

5. Tétouan, 1998

6. Tr. “Symmetry,” Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Franche-Comté, 1999.

7. Tr. “A Little One, A Little One,” Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Franche-Comté, 1999.

8. Tr. “Prayer Beads”—2004.

9. Notably the number 99 (the number of beads in a Muslim tasbih), which is found in numerous works: “Kemmoussa” (tr. “Little Bundle”—consisting of 99 black plastic bags of the same kind that pollute the Moroccan countryside, compressed and nailed—2001); “Melfoufa” (tr. “Spooled”—5 times 99 small volumes of black plastic string—2001); “Loqma” (tr. “Stuffed Up”—a sieve containing 99 balls of aluminum foil—2001); “Wahid” (tr. “One”—99-second video in which the artist chants “wahid” 99 times—2003.); “Intifada” (99 small bundles of white fabric hung on a wall—2003.).

10. Tr. “Six”—August 2005.

11. Due to a visa that was expired by a single day, while he was returning to Tétouan.

Image: Ghorfa. 214 x 236 x 185 cm, Painted wood, neon, sound, electric cable, and electricity, 2005-2007.

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