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Artworks:

Latifa Echakhch

There's tears / His statement came at the end of a detailed 50 minute account, 2015
52 grams blank newspaper mounted on canvas, ink, wooden frame
206.0 x 156.0 x 4.5 cm
In Latifa Echakhch’s work, ink appears in a recurring way and in diverse forms: solidified like in hats that seem discarded, absorbed into large raw canvases, poured onto tondi from the studio ceiling or watered down with methylated spirits. For the There’s Tears series, created in 2015, the artist mixed industrial inks used in printing in order to obtain a grey and slightly rose substance which she poured onto canvases previously covered with sheets of newspaper. The ink’s capacity to convey a rational message is replaced by another kind of non-verbal expressiveness, as though the text, thus rendered illegible, had been diluted in tears.

Like a storyteller, Echakhch endeavours to achieve a sound balance between form, technique and the message she wishes to convey. As is the case in most of her works, the apparent neutrality of a minimal approach implodes by the simple use of an object imbued with a sociological and cultural charge. Here the deliberate act of the effacement and dissolving of the writing conceals what seems to be a reaction to the distressing contents of the news which we are constantly subjected to by the daily press, as well as the desire to eradicate it by one means or another.

Through this gesture, which is both poetic and conceptual, the artist thus makes material the indifference in which the incessant information overload of our digital era tirelessly flows out, itself disappearing into the void. She confronts us with a sensorial reality which is no longer controlled by reason and is hence tragically shallow. The disappearance of meaning shifts memory towards a timeless dimension and provokes a strange feeling of grief, of an inevitable ambivalence, which oscillates between anger, sadness, resignation and hope.
Latifa Echakhch, There's tears / His statement came at the end of a detailed 50 minute account, 2015