Biography
Born in 1968 in Marrakech, Salah Benjkan, painter and engraver, is also a teacher of plastic arts. He was awarded the Wafabank Foundation Prize in 1993 and the Young Moroccan Painting Prize in 1995. He was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2000.
He lives and works in Marrakech.
Benjkan’s art combines modernity and tradition. In the abstraction as in the figuration, one retains with him a dynamics of the forms and a palette of lively colors. The pictorial composition in its totality is an arrangement subjected to the hold of the light and to the rules of its treatment by the surfaces and the forms that the light illuminates. If the approximations of the figure tend in Benjkan towards abstraction, it is because he wants at the same time to purify the visible and to densify it.
Besides, there is something of tragedy which begins to take shape in the painting of Benjkan, a feeling of which the range lets itself be seen through the touch, the color and the forms. The painted forms appear disfigured, scattered, even torn, because if the painter works these last years on elements of the real, things and other visible traces, his step is freely gestural, suggestive. The beings and the things are interiorized, reformulated, plunged in the anonymity, as to be dedicated to the loss.
