Amina Azreg, self-taught artist. Born in 1994 in Casablanca, she began her career as a fashion designer before ending up in painting. She creates a poetry of the gaze, imbued with mystery and memories, which shakes up our feelings. The canvas is a journey to times past, still present, perhaps.
Torn between different emotions, between reality and imagination, it is Casablanca that is represented. Its colors and details will make the dreamer smile. Sealed in interior universes, the symbolisms of the city emerge, thus, figured in the paradox between what was and what remains.
Realism then blends into the strange and the disappearance. The artist accentuates certain features to erase others, painting becoming the means of underlining and bringing buried sensations to the surface. The theatricalization of the sets becomes for her a means of developing a universe inscribed in timelessness. Once intimacy is created again, Amina Azreg manages to establish this touching feeling which is nourished by the obvious.
Milan Kundera wrote in immortality that “The vocation of poetry is not to dazzle us with a surprising idea, but to make a moment of being unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia. ” If this is painted poetry and not written, it is indeed this lively touch of emotion that the artist makes us feel. That of a moment which is no longer but which, nevertheless, could still be.
// Salomé Issahar Zadeh //

My work revolves around nostalgia and accidental poetry. I am interested in places frozen in time, intimately linked to their environments but which nevertheless seem disconnected from reality. As a fervent Casablanca resident, my work has evolved to become, among other things, a remembrance of the Casablanca period between the wars as a past whose poetry is now infertile.
The quest for this poetry is a metaphor for the quest for a link with my hometown, Casablanca. In this specular situation, where painting is my greatest ally, Casablanca is an everyday subject, a subject which folds and unfolds infinitely, but above all a subject deeply anchored in my existence. Trying to grasp the genius of the place, its places filled with monumentality, is for me the common thread in understanding a Casablanca past that I have not experienced but to which I am particularly sensitive.
I constantly reimagine the portrait of Casablanca by creating new visual narratives. I wander through its streets looking for this perfect place, playing on opposites, duality, the feeling of solitude or even absence. I also explore interiors where darkness and light mingle, and where narrowness gives the impression of a gradual shrinking towards intimacy. Thus, this gap created between this Casablanca image and its painted copy reveals a theatricality that escapes the visible.