Dilutions

Mennour is pleased to present Dilutions, Hicham Berrada’s fourth solo exhibition, that brings together a collection of new paintings.

Though the images you see appear as oil paintings of landscapes, whose compositions may evoke some of the greatest names in that field, these works are nonetheless the result of artificial intelligence. Hicham Berrada has taken hold of one of those tools—not one of the monsters mentioned so often today who consume boundless energy, but a more modest model. That model, emptied of all memory, was fed by the artist with all his past works: videos, performances, aquariums, praised or failed. Then he fed a second model with images that are perpetual sources of inspiration for him: paintings of landscapes, often linked to the aesthetics of the sublime or the unusual. Those two memories were merged together and led to identify and generate landscape elements like seas, skies and trees. Hundreds of images were produced, and some, chosen by the artist, were transposed through oil painting, with the expected results in differences and interpretations: the AI images were so small and hazy that it was the artist’s turn to identify and interpret them. It might seem surprising to some that an artist like Hicham Berrada, whom we associate with a poetic questioning of scientific protocols, turns to such a classic, if not archaic medium.

On closer examination, this new series stands in direct line with his previous work, in which he was involved in the reactions of metal to various chemical solutions. At the time he was already working in collaboration with a non-human agent whose actions he couldn’t predict. His new paintings do nothing more than seek a “non-human muse enabling the emergence of things” which “are in [his] brain”¹ Resorting to AI, Hicham Berrada asked afresh a question that has been haunting artists for at least two centuries: that of the relationship that the human author, the alleged subject, keeps with the “nature” he wishes to represent, the alleged object. Doesn’t delivering the most faithful, the most mimetic reproduction of “nature” amount to admitting its absolute perfection—therefore the relative uselessness of the artist? These have accumulated the effects so as to make their existence evident: inventions, projections of their emotions, visible brush-strokes. Anything and everything was used to show the contrastive and overdetermined interiority of the artist. Ernst understood well what was at stake by resorting to the technique of rubbing, which enabled him to distance himself from “any conscious mental construction […] reducing to the extreme the active part of the one who, until then, was called ‘the author’”². Hicham Berrada doesn’t look for anything else when he uses AI. The latter is not—yet—capable of creating. It only repeats and generates by probability things already identified. Resorting to AI contributes to weakening the myth, historically constructed, of the out-of-nothing creation of a work by an artist in their solitary interiority.

The ancient poets used to say they listened to the Muses, Medieval sculptors were guided by the Holy Spirit and illustrators from distant lands sought to work in harmony with a spirit or an ancestor. Hicham Berrada perceives in the crackling of the digital magma, landscapes to which he himself might have given birth. But does an artist ever create by himself? Does he ever extract himself from the flux of the world? Only our modernity made us believe that kind of chimera. Hicham Berrada has always seen the creation of artefact as a collective process. He doesn’t have difficulty in saying he has asked the help of collaborators to use AI or to make the paintings—not all artists are honest like that. His collaborators are not always human—yesterday it was metal, today AI. A way to reconnect art with its social and collective dimension, to re-establish it as a common good where human beings are part of a continuum in which they are not the only actors. A place of complicity between humans and non-humans, a moment of dilution of our exceptionalness.