Invited by the Musée éclaté de la presqu’île de Caen, the Palais de Tokyo has chosen to present the work of Hicham Berrada, on the main beach of Mèreville-Franceville.

Strongly influenced by his background as both an artist and a scientist, Hicham Berrada combines intuition and knowledge, science and poetry. He explores scientific protocols that closely imitate various natural processes and/or climatic conditions. An authentic operating theater, Présage is the result of a performance in which the artist combines various chemical products in a beaker. These manipulations produce a chimerical world in constant metamorphosis. These transformations of matter, simultaneously filmed and projected onscreen, immerse the audience in a world of fascinating colors and shapes.

The artist considers these ephemeral landscapes as genuine pictorial creations: “I try to control the phenomena I enlist as a painter controls his pigments and paintbrushes. My pigments and paintbrushes are heat, cold, magnetism, light.”

Combining the laboratory and the studio, chemical experiments and performances, the artist creates a personal universe that plays on the codes and protocols of the experimental approach he adopts. With L’arche de Miller, for example, he invites the viewer to directly experience the energies and forces that emerge from matter. An authentic slice of nature, his work invites the viewer to discover, in an unspoilt landscape, a fixed infinity, a world waiting to exist.

This work transports viewers to an alternate world, both living and inert, and suggests that they contemplate and question the notions of creation, nature, and matter. “Nature contains and gives us everything. In science, as in art, all we can do is redispose what already exists,” concludes the artist.

Born in 1986 in Casablanca, Morocco, Hicham Berrada currently lives and works in Paris, France.

The Musée éclaté de la presqu’île de Caen
As part of the contemporary section of the festival Normandie Impressioniste, the Musée éclaté de la presqu’île de Caen has invited fifteen artists, selected by fifteen cultural institutions, to create a work of art that resonates with the theme of water in Impressionist painting. Fifteen pavilions, formed by one or two containers, will be distributed through fifteen municipalities around Caen. Hicham Berrada was selected by the Palais de Tokyo to present a work on on the main beach of Mèreville-Franceville.

Musée éclaté de la presqu’île de Caen
A research project of the École supérieure d’arts & médias of Caen/Cherbourg.
Multi-site exhibition (information center located at ésam Caen/Cherbourg, Caen campus)
June 28 to October 27 2013
Opening Thursday, June 27
More information: www.mepic.fr