Focus on - "Version Soft" by Hicham Benohoud

13 - 21 July 2020
Focus on - 'Version Soft' by Hicham Benohoud

This week, we suggest you know more about the genesis of the photographic series Version Soft created in 2002 by Hicham Benohoud during a residency at the Espace photographic Contretype in Brussels.

 

Initially invited to photograph the city, Hicham Benohoud chose a more personal project to have himself photographed by local artists.

 

Discover the artist's intimacy through a text written by art critic Daniel Sotiaux.

  • Hicham Benohoud's new work entitled, " Version Soft", probably by derision, is, without doubt, the hardest and most confusing.

     

    For the first time, Hicham Benohoud shows himself in the biographical part of his work (he also makes purely geometric installations). Formerly hidden behind the camera (cf. "The Classroom", a series of photographs he made with his pupils) or manipulating the clichés with acids and other destructive substances making faces unrecognizable, Hicham Benohoud has crossed the Rubicon by staging and showing himself completely.

  • The result is a series of self-portraits, almost all conceived with the same modus operandi: bare torso, straight face, and...

    The result is a series of self-portraits, almost all conceived with the same modus operandi: bare torso, straight face, and fixed gaze, with for each of his shots, a disturbing intervention: a stone on his head, glued papers, the face strapped down, the face enclosed.

  • The atmosphere that emerges is again recalling the one of 'The Classroom' where students played in static sequences where various...

    The atmosphere that emerges is again recalling the one of "The Classroom" where students played in static sequences where various objects and interventions interacted with the children's bodies and faces. From these poses emerged an atmosphere of incommunicability and cold violence.

  • The material is restricted here. The scene narrows down to the artist's face. The playful side of the room has disappeared, as has the witness environment, the children who, in the classroom, continue their school work in the indifference of the scene unfolding before their eyes. The shock is thus frontal, brutal, without complicity. Moreover, the disquietingly fixed gaze fixes nothing but this photographer. So we are inside things, which allows the staging to go further and further until these last photos where the face ends up disappearing completely.

     

    We have never before been given to see so closely the troubles and interrogations of this artist who gives himself up without witness and therefore without shame.

     

    From there on, everything is symbolic. The stone would become the weight of the world, the social weight, the social system of conventions. But it is also a search for balance. Synthesis would, therefore, be possible: man, despite his confinement, could create a universe of a certain harmony.

     

    (...)

     

    All aligned, his portraits lead us, like repetitive music, towards other knowledge.

     

    Hicham Benohoud stages his inner scars to help us better take the plunge.

     

    The aim is to determine whether it will be possible one day to force the passage, to overcome anxieties, to build an open world where internal borders would be abolished.

     

    Daniel Sotiaux

    Member of AICA (Association, Internationale des Critiques d'Art).

    Catalogue’s exhibition, Version soft, Éditions du Musée de Marrakech, 2003

     

  • Oeuvres disponibles