And, don't we find a similar fascination for the prodigality of nature, those "of little things", leaves, flowers, stones, in the Franco-Moroccan artist Rita Alaoui, whose two paintings are linked to magnify the plastic beauty of the most ordinary plant motifs? By endeavoring to capture the effects of transparency and opacity of a plant as common as stonecrops, the painter continues her quest for an aesthetic of the “transfiguration of the banal” at the very heart of these natural, organic objects. or minerals, which populate our environments without our knowledge. This approach is reminiscent of that of a landscaper like Gilles Clément, attentive to the survival of vagrant plants in the city. Through her pictorial gesture of transforming these “little nothings” of nature that she collects and transforms into so many rare and singular pieces, Rita Alaoui undoubtedly invites us to remain on the lookout for this simple life on the surface of the earth of which we have lost the meaning.

Does it not in this way invoke that wisdom dear to the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch consisting of knowing how to recognize in “almost nothing” impalpable phenomena, among the most important things of existence, such as the modulation of the colors of a plant, the crevices of a stone, the shine and folds of a flower?

Rita Alaoui's approach is also part of a current practice of ecological art, aiming to collect and preserve within works or installations in order to leave an almost museum-like memory, forms of life likely to disappear. under the effect of ecosystem degradation.