excerpt
Emmanuelle Lequeux
(excerpt, p. 46)
A feeling of falling into the abyss, without the dizziness. An immanent yet invisible
force, an awe-inspiring vortex: here, everything disappears. In the drawings of
Abdelkader Benchamma, this force of attraction controls the elements and sucks
their life force. In each of his pieces, the smell of the chasm underlies all; it is a magnetic charge
that can make formerly fluid elements – water, earth or cloud – hang in midair, shocked and
staged. The void establishes the rules for this world as well as (if not better than) the other forms
at play here, and they resist its vacuum as best they can. We speak of black holes, why not white
holes? It's not the empty space surrounding the figures which strikes us, but the emptiness at
their center: it spits them out as much as it swallows them up. It is this nothingness that first
catches our eye, and forces the environment where it proliferates to do things differently.
Frequently what we have is a white page, empty of all movement; a space left in reserve by the
delicate precision of a black pen. Reserve is a common notion in the history of art – nothing is
accidental here. A reserve is something kept for later, something the drawing is holding for itself,
a redemptive “just in case”: anything can emerge from it, anything can fall in. Perhaps it's the
promise of a future that each image makes to itself. He's holding something back, we say, and
this is what the artist's images do, by sucking in the breath which makes them pulsate, giving
them a breathless quality, which contributes to this feeling of potential implosion. Abdelkader
Benchamma – whether in his landscapes and drifting figures or in his deviations into the near
abstract – captures this instant just after detonation and well before destruction.
(...)
