Contemporary Sculptor in Morocco: From Brush to Volume

Moving from painting to sculpture is never a simple change of tool — it is a change in one's relationship to matter. As a contemporary sculptor in Morocco, I approached volume starting from my concerns as a painter: light, transformation, the tension between surface and depth. Sculpture allowed me to push these questions into a third dimension, where cellulosic painting had kept them on a single plane.

Institutional commissions have been, in my career, the main testing ground for sculpture. The Trophy created for the International Agriculture Show in Morocco is the most accomplished example: a piece conceived around water and earth, which forced me to translate into volume intuitions that had until then been exclusively pictorial. I return in detail to this experience in this article on the dialogue between sculpture, water and earth.

Technically, moving into volume imposes constraints that painting ignores: weight, balance, resistance to the elements for a sculpture intended for a public space. These constraints are not limitations to be endured, but data that feed into the very conception of the work — somewhat the way aluminium, in painting, shapes the reading of light rather than constraining it.

Being a contemporary sculptor in Morocco today also means watching public sculpture gain institutional recognition, for public and professional spaces alike. Sculpture remains, in my practice, a space of research complementary to painting — a place where matter becomes literally tangible.

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