Like a black pupil, this painting seems to hook the spectator’s gaze, as though to lose it and confront it at the same time. A recent addition to the Collection Pictet, Tambour 88’ (Drum 88’) belongs to Latifa Echakhch’s ink works in which the evolution of the ink on the chosen surface eludes the artist’s will alone, as though guided by a random force. Latifa Echakhch openly reveals the process of the creative experience, with all its possibilities and hesitations, by equally taking into account the space and the time of the creation.
The Tambours are in fact the result of a patient and ingenious technical process: via a drip system, the artist lets black Indian ink flow from the highest point of her studio onto the centre of circular canvases laid directly on the floor. The falling drops provoke an imperfect projection and splashes that progressively form a dark, more or less dilated, mark. Its diameter varies according to the duration of the dripping (88 minutes in the present case), deliberately modified from one canvas to another and mentioned in the title of each version. This dripping technique, which uses the stretched canvas as a target, also engenders a regular sound of percussion, hence the reference to the drum.
The system implemented reverses the very notion of the Renaissance tondo, a circular painting intended, in particular, to decorate the ceilings of sacred places to represent the heavens. Instead of a biblical, mythological or profane iconography, Latifa Echakhch favours a black hole, an expressive abstraction arising from a minimal gesture, in which the relationship between matter and space takes precedence. Starting from thought on the potential of the materials employed, Latifa Echakhch here manages, powerfully and with subtlety, to make an instant both temporal and infinite spring forth.
The Tambours are in fact the result of a patient and ingenious technical process: via a drip system, the artist lets black Indian ink flow from the highest point of her studio onto the centre of circular canvases laid directly on the floor. The falling drops provoke an imperfect projection and splashes that progressively form a dark, more or less dilated, mark. Its diameter varies according to the duration of the dripping (88 minutes in the present case), deliberately modified from one canvas to another and mentioned in the title of each version. This dripping technique, which uses the stretched canvas as a target, also engenders a regular sound of percussion, hence the reference to the drum.
The system implemented reverses the very notion of the Renaissance tondo, a circular painting intended, in particular, to decorate the ceilings of sacred places to represent the heavens. Instead of a biblical, mythological or profane iconography, Latifa Echakhch favours a black hole, an expressive abstraction arising from a minimal gesture, in which the relationship between matter and space takes precedence. Starting from thought on the potential of the materials employed, Latifa Echakhch here manages, powerfully and with subtlety, to make an instant both temporal and infinite spring forth.
