Touhami Ennadre: 'Lumière Noire'
Exposition présentée dans le cadre de la manifestation "Le temps du Maroc"

Seeing Touhami Ennadres work for the first time is quite an experience. It is impossible to remain indifferent or calm. Either you will turn away, refusing to look at your image and the world, or you will be transfixed, fascinated, forced to react to the tragedy of human existence. The inner turmoil this work creates does not spell doom, nor does it wallow in suffering; it works towards your deliverance: its ultimate aim is one of shining catharsis.

What is striking about this work is the unity of its project and the feeling of necessity that runs through it. Ennadres guiding principle is that you have to give; you have to be truly true. It tears you apart. It brings out a whole lot of things you arent familiar with. Its either that or nothing.

He tries to discover the most real reality: light is the reality of the most real, its the only thing that obsesses me. He claims that he doesnt know what photography is: Im not a photographer. Technique has no importance, its at best a means to an end. What is important lies elsewhere : to thwart violence, misery and death.

Even at his mothers funeral, Ennadres first photographs were far from funereal: there are no tears, no coffin, just a resistance to grief in the bones and the skin of hands contorted with suffering. An affirmation of life expressed through its tragic condition. This crucial experience of death was to continue far into space and time.

As the speed of light is constant, one would like to state that Ennadres entire work is governed by a single constant. His work consists not of themes but of variations on a single theme, that of death. But this observation goes either too far or not far enough. It is true that Ennadre is part of that great tradition which places death at the heart of all artistic creation. The Dance of Death, tombs, literature from Montaigne to Bataille (to mention only French literature of a certain period), constitute so many points of reference. Mans mortal condition engenders artists. This is true enough, but its all too general. Its only part of the story: death, yes, but what kind of death, and how, and why?

I am a painter in the dark, says Ennadre, who makes abundant use of black to outline his subjects and to structure his images using lines and planes. Black is the other, it is the place the other occupies; it enables our vision to adjust, to appreciate the diversity of variations in density between the greys and the whites. This is no morbid blackness: it acts as a kind of lighting that throws forms into relief, emphasising their contours, giving them the required depth thanks to a clever counterpoint of light and shade, sometimes reminiscent of paintings by Caravaggio, or of the films of Murnau or Dreyer

Here, the photographic image concentrates all possible energies: those of Ennadre and our own. It then takes these energies and redirects them towards life, with its tensions, its intensities, its tragedies. This is done without artifice, without backlighting, but with darkness and light turned against death. This is a world inhabited by myths of origins , endings and rebirth. Only a poetic vision can reveal how the order of the cosmos demonstrates that life and death are indissociable.

To ask whether Ennadre is a photographer or not is a trivial question. He sculpts the light of catastrophes. His logic is that of a plastic artist drawing on the principles of an aesthetics of death. His images will shoot right through your eye into your brain.

Ennadre is a major artist; his work is unique...

François Aubral
From his book entitled Ennadre