In her paintings in acrylic, she continues her attention to details and to the shapes, lumps, porosities, and cavities present in the objects she collects. Others created using walnut stains...
In her paintings in acrylic, she continues her attention to details and to the shapes, lumps, porosities, and cavities present in the objects she collects. Others created using walnut stains bear witness to a set of gestures, to a movement of gathering or caressing. Recently, the view from the garden as seen from her studio has led her to create pictorial works in which she composes spaces where she confronts objects or furniture within a domesticated natural environment.
Her artistic work has universal scope and combines multiple references, from the art of interior gardening in Morocco, to the animist dimensions present in other cultures, as well as a touch of romanticism. Stones, for Rita Alaoui, lead her to convoke a single territory and enable her to cross the borders between her country of origin, Morocco, and other lands. Her artworks tend to help us become aware of the relationships between humans and non-humans.
She is also interested in trees and has made models of miniature forests that she presented 1m10 above the floor. She encouraged visitors to lean over, to bend down to approach the artwork. Her artworks recall the extent to which people seek to wield power over nature and we settle for a humble position as we confront these living forest-dwellers. The story unfolds inside her pieces – invitations to respect the lungs of nature.
Her artistic world offers a to-and-fro between microcosm and macrocosm, between the tiniest element and the environment in which she observes plant and mineral elements. Her creations encourage us to rethink our connections with nature, still preserved in the ancient cultures that respect it. These cultures remind us how the elements that emerge from water or earth embody the traces left by the passage of time.
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Her collected objects also give rise to assemblages, bringing together images and texts – like miniature spaces for recounting memories. She takes particular care with the objects that she arranges in her studio like an archaeologist. She then assembles them and images of characters are revealed by those who contemplate them. Her artworks are tinged with spirituality, echoing fetishes and objects used for rituals. Thread protects and repairs the element, which has left its milieu and has now been preserved to become a subject of mythologies. Inspired by poetry dedicated to the stones of Roger Caillois, the artist lends these elements a soul, personalising them, while reflecting on her childhood memories of giving objects names. The stones become reassuring, comforting, benevolent and physically represent a history. They contain the spirit of archaic places. Rita Alaoui likes to give evocative titles to her artworks that sometimes elicit stories.
Lately, she has allowed herself to be guided all the more by her approach to matter. Her ceramic sculptures were designed within the constraint of creating forms using just four or five gestures, traced by the hand directly out of the clay. By experimenting with clay in an almost primitive way, she seeks spontaneity, the wellspring of life. Her sculptural objects are made to be held in one hand and resemble figures as much as they do mountains or coral.
Recently, within the framework of her exhibition at the Café Parisien in Saulieu, Bourgogne, she created a three-dimensional work, Fétiches, made up of suspended string-bound driftwood pieces, which she glorified like sacred objects in a temple. In her compositions, installations, and in-situ paintings, a collection of artworks that tell a story, she sees her exhibition as the receptacle of her creations or even of her studio. In this sense, her exhibition Vos rêves [Your Dreams] at Artéfact Project Space in the Marais, Paris, provided her with the chance to create an artwork for the space, a mural painting and a space for her small-format works.
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