Hamid Fakhoury

HAMID FAKHOURY or the call to the sacred
Hamid Fakhoury is a mystery. His Instagram profile proclaims it from the start: "No gloss or verbiage, less palaver, dry your tears. Savor the silence. Heaven belongs to everyone".

Impossible to get a C.V. from him, that would be to lock him up, to reduce him, to force him; one of his friends will send it to me. On the contrary, he seeks to blur the boundaries, the limits, to go beyond the forbidden. A practicing Muslim, he has studied in theology the way to practice an art of human representation that is hallal. He affirms it, his heads are free of sin. Perhaps because it is the first man before the fall, the first woman, too?

His heads are raw, in raw clay, sometimes glazed. Sometimes painted, or cast in bronze. At the Coubertin foundry, one of the best today. He models exclusively with his fingers, and despite their colossal appearance, his heads, bordering on brutalism, all fit in his (large) hands. They are Adam, Eve, beyond morality, just drawn from the earth, in a tribute to the Creator God who molded us from clay. They inspire strength, assurance and dignity. A form of stability, a little anxious, as if the density of their being was unknown to them. Their modelling evokes Bourdelle, a kinship which the artist is delighted with, as he admires this great master of monumental sculpture. His models are most often of African type, more rarely Asian. A human type not very frequent in statuary, and often chosen for its "exoticism" in the colonial period. Hamid Fakhoury does not introduce any aesthetic or narrative distance. He enters deeply into his subject, the essence of man. A creature, the work of art of God. The features are sketched out, but each one has a character, an expression of its own, and very strong. He is inspired by real encounters, by what he feels about us, in spite of us. Perhaps he is less a sculptor of heads than a sculptor of souls. After all, he is also an abstract painter, and in his paintings one has the impression of seeing the sky from space: a blue and white planet that is complex and strong, moving and so simply beautiful.

All his work is a silent reflection on the gift of creation that brings us closer to the Creator.

Hamid Fakhoury was born in Casablanca in 1965. He lives and works in La Verrière, in the Yvelines.

Model for haute couture brands in the 80s, which allowed him his high height, his presence and his elegance, he spawned among the people of the world. Pierre and Gilles will make his portrait in 1985, in the series of the Shipwrecked. He discovered painting in the workshops of Chari Goyeneche in his neighborhood house, before taking courses at the Beaux-Arts. He first worked in drawing and watercolor, before moving on to sculpture and painting. Space and the cosmos, creation and the created are his source of inspiration. He worked for a long time for the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Foundation for Youth, but now devotes himself totally to his art.