The motifs in Youcef Korichi's latest series—barriers, fences, bushes bristling with spiky thorns, the edges of forests, grounds, clouds—lead viewers into a profound reflection on painting. This meditation goes beyond the surface of the painting's chassis, to consider concepts of borders and checkpoints. His effigies powerfully resonate with today's zeitgeist: the first work in the series, around which this exhibition hinges, is a photorealistic depiction, in very large format, of a barbed-wire defense—a tragic icon of the current era.

The photorealistic aspect of the painting is certainly striking, but it shouldn't distract the viewer. On the contrary. Korichi offers an alternative to the cult of the instant snapshot in which we live. To him, the snapshot is a starting point; the painted image is a long journey; and beyond it lies the opening of the mind. His paintings reveals an approach to his craft that takes its time, that requires a radical amount of time. The artist allows us to see what we might otherwise never be able to glimpse.

The deliberate selection of scenes, sites, motifs, and formats, the use of a grid to scale the work, the patient application of oil paint on the prepared canvas, the variations, as diptychs, triptychs, or polyptychs, little by little, end to end: every element is inscribed in an expansive timeline. So that a kind of salubrious mimicry takes place in the viewer, compelled to study the painting with a patient, slow, exacting gaze, to fully grasp what has been painted. Korichi is motivated by his rejection of easiness or convenience, by his refusal to stay in his comfort zone. This temporality of the paintingʼs fabrication—from the site to the studio, from the studio to the wall—is an onerous mediation of that which is being presented, and along the way, of the possibility of grasping the reality that surrounds us. The artist, a pure painter, wants us to look beyond commonplace motifs to the dialectic between opacity and translucency, between fixation and displacement.