The Generative Archive
My current work is an attempt to bring order to my past and present. To do so, I combine my older works with recent creations through digital means. This approach was born from two major discoveries: Hockney’s iPad works, for their joy and freedom, and Richter’s Atlas, for its coherence and rigor.
From 2023 onward, a sense of disenchantment linked to events in the West and the Middle East, the region I come from, slowed my creative drive. Reworking my earlier drawings, paintings, and photographs became a way to regain stability and develop a distinctive graphic language, somewhere between tradition and new technology, opening the door to a new imaginary.
At sixty, I have come to appreciate the importance of my archives, the fruit of forty years of work. Within them, I seek out pieces that hold a particular resonance, emotional or aesthetic, which I catalog by place, date, and technique. Combined with my recent works using software, they generate hybrid images where layers merge, assemble, or fade away, much like on a palimpsest.
The resulting work hovers between painting and photography, and a new poetic dimension emerges. Above all, by marrying past and present, the final image gives rise to a form of continuity of life, a condensed inventory of my journey, that remedies chaos and amnesia.
Material : Hahnemühle Museum Paper on Dibond. Edition of 3.
