He exhibits his works for the first time at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
He is called the sculptor of light. He masters his art from start to finish. Each of his prints is therefore a unique piece. It exalts black in its most extreme intensity. We are talking here about Touhami Ennadre. This major internationally recognized photographer is exhibiting his works for the first time under the theme “Black Qasida” at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat (MMVI).
“We are happy to continue to give photography the place it should have and to conclude this cycle with one of the major photographic artists. Touhami Ennadre presents exclusively black and white photographs taken all over the world, through which he expresses and transmits his sensitivity to the “viewer”. This sensitivity that he himself has frozen through his lens. He is the witness of moments that push us to question ourselves about ourselves”, expressed on this subject Mehdi Qotbi, president of the National Museums Foundation.
For Touhami Ennadre, it is a huge honor to exhibit at the MMVI. It is also, and he is very keen on it, the opportunity to speak to the youth of his country, in particular to those who look so much like him: “What my street has given me is so powerful that it can break down walls. What I want to pass on to the children who are going through today, what I went through yesterday, is my deep conviction that, if we work, we can get there”. The artist thus presents a selection of works dealing with several themes, whether violence, spirituality or just humanity…
Born in the old medina of Casablanca, brought up in France but, now and above all, a citizen of a world that he never ceases to explore. Ennadre is not a photographer like the others. Moreover, he defines himself as “a painter in the dark”. “Black is a color of light. I am a painter in the dark, the dark is the other, it is the place of the other,” he says.
Ennadre’s work in black, of an exceptional aesthetic unity, is unique in the history of modern photography by the use of a black become light which reveals and illuminates.
“I am an artist who uses photography, its fundamental black and white, to work with light as others use painting or sculpture for the same purpose,” he says.
Black represents for him a color of light. Light that unifies his work and magnifies the human in each person he meets. According to him, this unique, sensitive and sensual approach owes everything to Medina. In artistic circles, this artist is said to be a photographer for ease. Certainly it is. But really in his own way because if he uses a camera, he frees himself from its operating modes as soon as the shot is taken. “I am self-taught. My practice, I invented it from start to finish. I use a camera without a viewfinder to get as close as possible to my subject, I seize it without knowing it and tearing it away, in motion like the intrepid footballer that I was as a child, ”he explains. -he. Black and white is the value of true light for those who know how to make shadows speak without reproducing them. It is the intensity of his black that sheds light on Touhami Ennadre’s prints and makes him a pure artist.