Hamid El-Kanbouhi

(b. 1976, Larache, Morocco; lives and works in Amsterdam)

Zee-man, 2017
Oil on linen, 150 x 200 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Nouvelles Images Gallery, The Hague

“Free of the white person’s gaze, black people created their own unique vernacular structures and relished in the double play that these forms bore to white forms,” philologist Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote in 1988. “Repetition and correction are fundamental to black artistic forms.” Such techniques are very characteristic of the work of Hamid El-Kanbouhi, a Moroccan who moved to Amsterdam at the age of nineteen. In the painting Zee-man, the background of a traditional European portrait is complemented with elements of collage (three men in the upper part of the canvas), but instead of spatial connectivity, the artist uses a collision of painting rhythms on different surfaces. The painting emerges as a platform for the intertwining of types of self-representation in the European and Arab worlds. A portrait is a pose that distinguishes a person from the mass and turns them into an object of worship or desire. In recent times, thanks to realist artists and early photographers, the social function of a portrait has come to involve the revision of social strata. This review can have humanistic aims (as is the case for the Wanderers, a group of nineteenth-century Russian artists who placed the urban and rural poor at the forefront of their paintings), as well those related to police surveillance. In a modern city, however, there are communities that oppose total identification for religious and personal reasons, preferring to exclude themselves from the general catalogue of individuals. The name of El-Kanbouhi’s painting can be interpreted as a hint at dissolution on the atomic level. In physics, the Zeeman effect is the splitting of the spectrum into several components as the result of a magnetic field. For the artist, the role of the magnetic field is played by the multicultural city, where a multitude of communities (components) have appeared as a result of post-colonial political changes.