Hicham Berrada Turns Scientific Experiments into Sublime Sculptures
They look like underwater landscapes: Rocky coral ranges reach out of the depths, shimmering under a thin layer of smoke. In fact, these sculptures—part of the series “Cartes Mères” by Moroccan artist Hicham Berrada—are the results of chemical reactions, preserved in resin. Each captures a single moment in the experiments that the artist carries out in his studio, a kind of makeshift lab. While the artist describes himself as a sculptor, his works’ ultimate forms are a product of chance interacting with his own planning: “I never design shapes directly; I design setups so shapes can emerge,” he said.
Featured in recent museum shows in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo and Bourse de Commerce, as well as at Paris gallery Mennour, Berrada’s work is now gaining more attention outside of France. Later this year, he will have his first institutional solo show at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen in Germany. His current solo show, “Remains,” on view at Wentrup in Berlin through January 20th, takes the same approach that has marked his wider oeuvre: using scientific processes, more commonly found in a lab, to create sculptures.
Such processes are captured in the work for which Berrada is best known, the video Presage (2007–present). In it, copper, nickel, and gold materials are placed in a solution, through which an electric current is passed. Sometimes shown on immersive, panoramic screens, the video captures metals being deposited over time into weird but organic-seeming shapes, like sparkling stalagmites.
For Berrada, both his time-based works and sculptures that isolate moments within chemical reactions relate to his wider interest in engineering our experience of the present. “Time is really fascinating for me as a sculptor,” he said, noting that his works take varying durations to produce, due to the types of chemicals involved. Unlike so many other things in our contemporary world, time can’t be easily commercialized, giving the works a kind of intrinsic value.
Portrait of Hicham Berrada. © TETARD.
Shown for the first time at Wentrup, the artist’s newest series, “Hygres” (all 2023), is a set of wall-based sculptures formed out of 3D-scanned natural objects. These digital impressions—inspired by frottage, the technique of rubbing a pencil on paper directly over an object to create a relief, famously used by Max Ernst—are then manipulated using computer programs to create fantastical, mask-like shapes. Hygres #2 resembles a butterfly; another, Hygres 3, evokes a dragon. Painted with glittering, lustrous car paint, the sculptures combine natural formations and high-tech, man-made shimmer. “I take a little thing and make it big, or take a big thing and make it tiny,” Berrada said, describing his digital manipulation techniques. “Everything can mutate a lot because it has no weight; it has no physical properties.”
In one video on view at Wentrup, Permutations — CPU (2023), Berrada couples digital and physical manipulation. The work is a single shot, zoomed in on a computer chip, suspended in an aqueous solution. As in the “Cartes Mères” series, he runs electricity through the liquid. During the course of the slow-motion video, particles of gold float off the object’s surface like dust, echoing a process, Berrada explained, that has been used to recycle the metal from old computers. Slowed down so much that the moving image could be mistaken for a photograph, the process becomes absorbing and sublime, inviting comparison between our human perception of time and a longer-term planetary view, in which molecules are reused across millennia.
An artist whose own work crosses mediums, Berrada often finds himself inspired by video games and cinema, and cites influences including Danish game developer Playdead Studios and director David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Indeed, his “Hygres” works look as if they could have come from a Cronenberg prop room, their organic surfaces covered in a metallic sheen. When making his own films, Berrada sees himself, too, as a director of sorts. But instead of actors, he directs chemical reactants to take their own path: “It’s almost like making a movie without people, but starring copper, electricity, and energy,” he said.
