Youssef El Khorib (Youcha)

Youssef El Khorib, nickmaned Youcha, is born in 1963 in Morocco and lives in the medina of Assilah. Youcha catches the visitor’s eyes with his strange works composed on various supports, cloth, canvas or papers… Outside and imaginary worlds seem to wallow in a jubilation of assorted faces, signs and minarets, rowboats, donkeys and a hand of fatma. His paintings chant a way to apprehend the everyday life far from the usual boring parts.

His universe is a perpetual swing between dream and reality.
Youcha is a self-taught artist, but he has always been painting with his wide opened eyes looking at the bell tower adjacent to the minaret of the neighborhood. Farther away, there is the ocean and those tubs where ten, or twenty or even thirty men climb in their quest for the European heaven. There is also the paperman, the life in the narrow streets surrounded by the 500 years Portuguese old huge walls, and the crackle of the radio endlessly spelling the dead, drawn between the African coast and Gibraltar…