Safâa Erruas — Anticorps — Dominique Fiat Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 2 → March 30, 2013

Safaa Erruas was born in 1976 in Tetouan in northern Morocco.

After studying at the Institute of Fine Arts in her hometown, Tetouan, she stood out very quickly by a radical approach towards monochrome and white.

While studying, she started traveling through various cities of Morocco to inventory patterns and colors of the souks and major markets. Since that time, the artist felt the need to purify her universe, all these colors giving place to monochrome.

The materials she uses evokes lightness, softness, transparency and symbolizes extreme violence. The confusion of forms induces on another hand the feelings.

All the issues related to the body are suggested, the body-as-object, illness of the body or people living in changing societies with uncertain political conditions.

To reach her aim, she uses, cloths, gauzes, ceramic beads, cotton, needles which are all soft and sharp materials who both oppose and gather themselves to showcase powerful words.

In Anticorps, her first solo exhibition at the gallery Dominique Fiat, Safaa Erruas’s work is an allusion to silent pain.

This theme is developed through various aspects, scientific, but also intimacy, in order to reach the individual and society. This presence of pain can take many forms, extreme pain, that can be obvious, but also a speechless pain that would be drawn by thousands of invisible scars that scrarified our sole.

The artist refers to the poem Invictus written by William Ernest Henley on his hospital bed (after his foot amputation at the age of twenty-five).

Nelson Mandela’s favorite poem reflects perfectly the fundamental aspects of Safaa Erruas’s work with both the idea of ​​Visible / Invisible without any opposition between these two words.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.



In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.



Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.



It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Safaa Erruas is also exhibited at the Institut du Monde Arabe for the Twenty-five years of The Arab Creativity until February 3.