A yearlong sabbatical began for Hicham Berrada on July 5, 2018, the sunny day on which he first arrived in Lens. He had just left his home and studio in Paris, with the intention of moving to the provinces at the end of his residency. The objects that paraded out of the trunk of a moving van and into his Lens studio were reminiscent of Jacques Prévert’s famous poem “Inventory”: two aquariums, one plastic column, a dozen small pots in various bright colors, eight plants, and so on. Berrada’s well-orchestrated little world gradually fell into place, as the artist set up his state-of-the-art technological and digital equipment and its chemical and mineral components. Like nature reasserting itself, in collaboration with the artist.
From his childhood in Morocco, when he would immerse himself in his parents’ specialized atlases of rocks and mushrooms, Hicham has been fascinated by nature’s creations—“I was ’initiated’ at a very young age,” he says. His interest in morphogenesis (the formation of shapes) dates back to this period, in particular to the vacations he spent in Lourdes, his maternal family land, where he wandered the forests. “As a child, I liked to paint with gouache. Then I became interested in computer-generated images and photography,” he recalls. After his high-school graduation (he obtained a scientific baccalaureate), Berrada enrolled in a school of applied arts. “It was there that I came to understand that the fine arts would allow me to develop something unique. I wasn’t interested in expressing myself as much as in developing something different, wholly mine.”
“I’m trying to master the phenomena as a painter masters his pigments and brushes. My brushes and pigment would be the heat, the cold, the magnetism, the light.”
After a stint at the Beaux-Arts, in Paris, where he studied under the sculptor Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Berrada came to realize, through various experiments, that he was no longer interested in collecting forms existing in nature, but rather in creating new shapes himself, “appropriating them, controlling their appearance and development.” An important refence for Berrada is Walter de Maria’s masterpiece of Land Art, The Lightning Field, for which de Maria, in 1977, “called on lightning to participate in his composition,” thus prompting an encounter between man and nature.
While Berrada instinctively finds inspiration in art history, he also finds clues to what he is trying to express in Greek philosophy. From Aristotle’s Physics, he noticed this common point between a gymnast, a farmer, and a doctor: all three collaborate with nature, deliberately as well as indirectly, to achieve their goals. “I work in the same vein, embracing chemical processes that unfold over time, hand in hand with nature.” In Berrada’s work, science becomes a tool for summoning reality. His experiments take place in an uncharted field of scientific research. He does not seek results that apply to the medical or military industries, but to the visual realm. And that are of high poetic significance.
“It’s as though I were conducting an orchestra of inanimate or artificially animated things, that is, things that mimic the animate but are actually mineral or computer-based.” He adds, with a sly smile: “there is nothing alive here, except the cacti.”
Berrada saw his residency as an expansive period, an opportunity to continue research he had started but had not yet resolved. “I had some leads when I began, like the algorithms I was interested in while I was at Villa Médicis, or 3D geometry.” He draws an analogy between plant growth and the development of his own work: “economic and human resources cannot accelerate these processes.” Like Alexander Calder conducting his famous Circus, Berrada activates a multitude of media and instruments: a 3D printer, cooling trays, glue, welding tools, compressors and airbrushes, cameras and computer software. “It’s as though I were conducting an orchestra of inanimate or artificially animated things, that is, things that mimic the animate but are actually mineral or computer-based.” He adds, with a sly smile: “There is nothing alive here, except the cacti.” And his fervid imagination.
At the close of this year of experimentation, the Louvre-Lens, the residency’s prestigious neighbour, presented Berrada’s work in an exhibition entitled “Generated Landscapes,” staged in the museum’s Glass Pavilion from June 19 to September 1, 2019. Within the aquariums were cannibalized sculptures made of bronze, silver, brass, and tin, and altered by waters charged with electroconductivity, which have a destructive effect and erode some of the materials. The notion of entropy (of organizational disorder) irrigates the thought process of the artist, who sees disasters as a work of nature: “It’s very beautiful, the moment when something collapses, you have the impression of witnessing a state of grace.” This feeling of astonishment experienced by the spectator, Berrada is the first to experience it in his studio. Then, by controlling each parameter, he reproduces the desired phenomenon, in a given space and time, for the benefit of his audience.
Within the aquariums were cannibalized sculptures made of bronze, silver, brass, and tin, and altered by waters charged with electroconductivity, which have a destructive effect and erode some of the materials. The notion of entropy (of organizational disorder) irrigates the thought process of the artist, who sees disasters as a work of nature: “It’s very beautiful, the moment when something collapses, you have the impression of witnessing a state of grace.” This feeling of astonishment experienced by the spectator, Berrada is the first to experience it in his studio. Then, by controlling each parameter, he reproduces the desired phenomenon, in a given space and time, for the benefit of his audience.