For its participation in this 4th edition, L’Atelier 21 exhibits works of artists Mo Baala, Moustapha Baidi Oumarou, M’barek Bouhchichi, Hako Hankson, and Yamou.

Mo Baala is interested in drawing as much as painting through collages, sculpture, or graffiti. His art borrows from street art and the heritage elements inscribed in his surroundings. A fan of spontaneity and a particular form of recovered primitivism, Mo Baala paints works well rooted in the artist’s environment.

Moustapha Baidi Oumarou is a Cameroonian artist who has developed an aerial painting that has imprinted his making and his world of representation. Oumarou has developed an aerial, poetic vocabulary to paint men and women facing the harshness of life. He always tends to soften their suffering with dignity and humanity, which makes the people he paints irreducible to the world’s misery.

The body is a theme with multiple ramifications in M’barek Bouhchichi. Molded, sculpted, drawn, and painted, it is highlighted through a kaleidoscope of signs, fragments (almost votive), and images that show a significant preoccupation of the artist: painting Moroccan men and women with black skin.

Hako Hankson is a Cameroonian painter. Attached to the myths and beliefs of his region, the artist takes ancestral rites and gives them a contemporary resonance. Hako Hankson’s paintings are based on narration, sometimes replacing the spoken word to tell stories. The artist’s plastic language is characterized by a great maturity that gives a solid presence to the characters and objects he paints.

Yamou has yet to finish creating, undoing and recreating his pictorial garden without ever being satisfied with the result, engaging each time in new research, consistently exploiting innovative, new paths without losing his fusional passion for nature. One stands in front of a Yamou painting as a child would stand at the edge of a majestic forest, both attracted and intimidated by its powerful and silent mystery.

L’Atelier 21 is the first Moroccan art gallery to have introduced its artists to international fairs in the early 2010s. Founded in 2008, L’Atelier 21 is committed to supporting and encouraging artistic development and has established itself as a space dedicated to the promotion and diffusion of visual arts in Morocco

Source: L’Atelier 21