Younes Khourassani: Portrait of a Moroccan Visual Artist Between Painting and Sculpture

Being a visual artist in Morocco means inscribing oneself — whether one wishes to or not — within a history. That of the Casablanca School, carried by figures such as Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi and Mohamed Hamidi, who in the 1960s and 1970s shaped a vision of Moroccan art freed from Western academicism. Born in 1976 in Casablanca, I grew up as a direct continuation of this legacy: I studied under Mohamed Hamidi at Lycée Jabir Ibnou Hayane before joining the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca. I discuss this at greater length in our article on the legacy of the Casablanca School.

My practice was first built around matter — assemblages, metals, salvaged objects — in an approach that the critic and writer Edmond Amran El Maleh described as a "poetics of matter." This early period, marked by direct work on raw materials, laid the foundations for a reflection that would later shift, from 2020 onward, toward light as an organising force of the work rather than a mere visual effect.

As a contemporary painter based in Casablanca, I work primarily with cellulosic paint on panel and aluminium — a demanding medium, inherited from the automotive industry, which captures and returns light in a way few other techniques allow. This technical choice is not incidental: it reflects a conviction that matter should become a space of passage rather than an end in itself.

My work as a contemporary sculptor is expressed in particular through institutional commissions — the official Trophy of the International Agriculture Show in Morocco (SIAM), produced for several successive editions, is its most visible illustration. These sculptures revolve around fundamental resources — water, earth — treated not as illustrative subjects but as forces to be plastically interrogated.

This dual practice as painter and sculptor has led me to exhibit in very varied contexts: international fairs such as 1-54 (Paris, London, Marrakech) and Abu Dhabi Art, institutional exhibitions at UNESCO in Paris, artistic residencies such as the one carried out with INFINIMENT COTY PARIS. My works are now held in several public collections, including the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat and the Bank Al-Maghrib Museum.

Being a Moroccan visual artist today therefore means navigating between a strong local anchoring — the Casablanca medina, the memory of the Casablanca School, the country's particular light — and a fully contemporary place on the international art scene. It is this tension, generative rather than contradictory, that continues to nourish my work.

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