Fez — The Comptoir des Mines Galerie is hosting “Sarabande,” the latest exhibition by Yasmina Alaoui, on view until March 8. The show signals a decisive shift in the artist’s creative process, embracing oil painting in what reads as a manifesto for material presence at a time when artificial intelligence increasingly shapes image production.
In “Sarabande,” Alaoui turns away from digital mediation and toward the tactile weight of paint. The exhibition unfolds as a choreography of intertwined bodies, where movement overtakes figure and hierarchy dissolves.
Rather than offering fixed focal points, the canvases draw the eye into a restless circulation. Bodies twist and merge in dense clusters, refusing clear boundaries between foreground and background.
The suggested body
Scenes of entangled forms structure the paintings. In these aggregations of distorted nudes, the viewer struggles to isolate a single subject. Alaoui deliberately blurs distinctions between individuals, planes, and gestures. The effect is one of instability. Life and death, sensuality and decay, eroticism and modesty coexist in unresolved tension.
This dissolution of limits reflects what the artist describes as a desire for “non-confrontation,” but also a deeper exploration of unstable states. Her brushwork oscillates between insistence and lightness, as if the figures themselves hover on the edge of disappearance. Color becomes flesh. Cool blues and greens temper the compositions, while ochres reintroduce warmth. Light seems to emanate from within the bodies, enhanced by a subtle blur that reinforces their fragility.
At the threshold of truth
The second part of “Sarabande” presents a contrasting photographic series. Here, minimalism replaces painterly excess. Lines are sharp, compositions geometric, and spatial divisions clear. In these restrained images, a solitary female figure stands draped and faceless within architectural volumes that impose order and verticality.
The body appears reduced to a silent mass among other forms, almost like a living stele. Sculpted by light that carves depth into the scene, the figure conveys vulnerability and containment. Tones of gray, blue, black, and milky white intensify the atmosphere of restraint. Where the paintings dissolve the body into collective motion, the photographs isolate it within silence and structure.
Born in New York and trained in Paris and the United States, Alaoui has long cultivated a hybrid visual language shaped by her multicultural background. Since 2003, she has exhibited in Morocco, France, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, and the United States. Throughout her practice, she has sought to erode oppositions and reconcile contrasts.
In Marrakech, her work invites viewers to linger at the threshold between abstraction and flesh, between disappearance and affirmation, in a meditation on what it means to remain visible in an age of dematerialized images.
