Kacem Noua

Figuration, landscape, two-dimensionality, three-dimensionality, so many words that do not apply to the work of Kacem Noua, an artist who encourages questioning rather than contemplation.

A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Kacem Noua quickly moved away from the existing genres of painting to create his own artistic universe, a universe at the height of abstraction. When one is confronted with Noua's work, one finds oneself deprived of any spatio-temporal reference point, thanks to his very specific technique.

Halfway between painting, photography and sculpture, our artist conceives his works as "exercises in ocular musculation", "something that installs doubt as to the identity of what we are looking at". It is true that as a spectator, our eye wonders where to go. We explore the work by sight, not knowing what we are looking at or what exactly we should be looking at, it makes us want to touch it to find the truth. But Kacem Noua's practice removes the possibility of analyzing his works by touch since his finished works are acrylics on marine plywood with an almost photographic rendering.

His process is complex and anchored in an unchanging research around the act of painting. He paints large areas of color, in different movements, and is interested in the volumes given by the paint. He chooses one of these volumes that he enlarges and transfers to another support in an extremely detailed, almost photographic way. He then affixes his works to a white wall, and they seem to detach themselves from the wall, as if flying above the ground. Kacem Noua has evolved this process as he has grown as an artist, but his research and the purpose of his work has remained almost unchanged. In the 1980s and 1990s, he explored volumes that evoked scrolls or moving foam. Today, he concentrates on a more advanced exploration of the pictorial material. He photographs a trace of paint that he has deposited on a glass plate, then makes several preparatory sketches in order to choose the detail that he wants to reproduce in large format and identically.

By exploring the pictorial material, but also the relationship of the artist to painting, the process of realization and the act of painting itself, Kacem Noua places himself in the lineage of artists such as Jackson Pollock. His acrylics are intended to give everyone the possibility to create their own images by not letting any possible imaginary dominate his works. Thus, they embody all the possibilities, a truth proper to each one, an ecstasy attainable by art.

Text : Inès Britel