Latifa Echakhch

Sun set down, 2022
In her series ‘Sun set down’, Echakhch referes to the classical representation of the sky in Italian Renaissance frescos. The paintings are almost mystic visions that somehow seems to have been weakened. In fact, only certain fragments of the painted image are still intact, while there are large sections missing. Echakhch has made use of a cherished technique here, one that is close to fresco. After laying down a base of black paint, she has applied a fine, rugged layer of cement, ‘with a trowel, like when one prepares a wall’. She has then painted the landscape with a palette of saturated acrylic colours, only to destroy it by vigorously scrapping against the cement. ‘I was interested in making the viewer feel the different gestures and stages in the fabrication of the work,’ she says. Our attention is held as much by the representation of the sunset as by the grey sections where the colour has been forcefully removed. Sun set down deconstructs representation to the point where the viewer can and must complete the image. For some viewers, it’s a crumbling landscape, or rather the representation of a landscape that is crumbling. For others, it’s an idyllic image emerging from under a layer of cement. The deconstructive process clashes brutally with the initially Romantic subject. The dichotomy between the violent gesture of scraping off and the formal harmony echoes the tension that exists between exaltation and menace. The destruction of the crepuscular landscape is in contradiction with the natural sublime, which in turn seems imbued with nostalgia.
This is the narrow precipice along which Latifa Echakhch walks, between gesture and form, representation and abstraction, destruction and creation, in a virtuosic attempt to link the past to the future, the world’s end to the promise of a new dawn.