BIO
Born in Guercif, Morocco in 1972, Ahmed Hajoubi is one of the most talented Moroccan contemporary artists. Since his first exhibition in 1993 and obtaining his diploma the following year from the Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, the artist has developed a protean work which, oscillating between drawing, sculpture, painting and installation, consists in a scholarly exploration of childhood. Marked by a laborious treatment of the material and the option of rather austere objects, familiar to his imagination as the son of a druggist, his approach strikes by a constant jubilant atmosphere, soliciting from the diversity of mediums the expression of a ingenuous wonder before the spectacle of the world. Each exhibition of the visual artist is an event, bringing mastery and above all a capacity for astonishment, which shows the ability of this art to constantly rethink its vocabulary and its modes of existence. In 2010, Hajoubi put an end to his career as an artistic director of communication that he had been pursuing for twenty years and left for the Cité des Arts in Paris. There he deepened his reflection on wool, which, three years later, led to the exhibition "Qorchâl" (literally, "Carde"), a turning point in his career. The artistic device that he presents there confirms this hint of a scar that appears in his previous creations, in particular the boats lost at sea, the charred cushions and the canvases where his fetish character, the child-mage, seems locked in interiors voluntarily chaotic. Starting out in a biographeme linked to the mother and set in childhood, a scrupulous rhetoric loads the series of cards with aesthetic effects that speak as much of the power of art to transform memory into new possibilities of emotion as the revenge of creation on the wounds of yesteryear, physical and interior. The literal presentation of the card is the common denominator of exhibitions up to 2020. Since then, the artist has said that he has devoted himself to a new experience, where, under the most depersonalized appearances, an intimate confidence will still be heard. Several critical reflections are devoted to the art of Ahmed Hajoubi, which is the subject of a large number of acquisitions for institutional and private collections, in Morocco and abroad.