Mouhcine Rahaoui is part of these artists whose personal history informs his creative approach. His multi-dimensional works write a docu-fiction: between the reality of the coal mines and the tales that accompany them. Rahaoui is not a miner. His father used to be. Although he has never actually worked in the mines himself, the echoes and testimonies he grew up with have left a deep imprint on his visual practice. As a child of Jerada, a Moroccan mining town close to the Algerian border, he makes them his own, reincarnating the mines.
Rahaoui composes the aesthetics of the miner and establishes their legend. The landscapes arise from the matter and dissect the bowels of the Earth, excavating as mysterious as ominous horizons. Rahaoui's abstraction captures the feeling of the town, haunted by the mine and those who worked there and still do, despite the legal end of mining in the 2000s.
His solo exhibition - À l’horizon, une obscure clarté - testifies of a conceptual research around the mine. Rahaoui portrays a reality that, in the imagination, belongs to a distant fable rather than to everyday life. He conveys feelings of dependence and risk combined with fascination and hope. While honouring the memory of the miner in the inevitability of their alienation from the earth, it underlines the movements of resistance and solidarity that reign in the face of adversity.
In the words of Corneille, 'the obscure light that falls from the stars' bathes the battlefront in a strange glow, foreshadowing the coming battle and disturbing the stillness of the night. In Mouhcine Rahaoui's hands, this dark light is the light from the depths of the mines. Just as disturbing, it awaits the men with the black hands who leave to work the coal. This seems to be the only possible horizon in a town where the economy revolves mainly around the uncontrolled and dangerous coal industry. Mouhcine Rahaoui constructs a poetic and social documentary on the human condition, on the future of man plagued by the curse of resources, and his desire to turn away from a fate that nevertheless seems inevitable.
On the walls, Jerada's face is fragmented. Everyday objects - shreds of bags that once contained bread and were then used to transport coal, candles and ropes - embody the geological layers through which the miners descend every day. Coal is omnipresent in his work, appearing not only as a subject but above all as a medium. It provides colour, texture and movement. It becomes pigment and protagonist, captured in a mixture of wax and glue or applied directly onto the surface of the canvas. In this exploration of matter, Rahaoui proposes a manifesto of instability, infused with an aesthetic of collapse and danger to embody the feeling of insecurity that emanates from the mine.
Mouhcine Rahaoui develops his visual vocabulary from the lexical field of the miner, intrinsically linking the worker to his environment, inextricably crossing their destinies, just as, visually, wax mingles with coal. The miner is reincarnated in the object, caught up in the reality of his condition.
Further on, the black dust covering the playing cards evokes the fatality of silicosis: a lung disease caused by inhaling fine coal dust, common among mine workers.
At the end of this journey through the memory of Jerada, after accompanying the miners as they worked and rested, the visitor enters the darkness of the mine, with the voice of the artist's mother recounting her memories in the background. The image of his hands kneading bread gleams in the half-light.
In this way, Mouhcine Rahaoui, in his desire to introduce his town to the world, pays tribute to the miners and sends them a message of hope: the hope of choosing their own future.
