We start this journey with Mare Nostrum (Latin for ‘Our Sea’) – a series of five meticulous works rendering different perspectives of the Mediterranean Sea with metallic threads and broken microscope cover glass on cotton paper. As an artist living in the northern most part of Africa just kilometres from the southern European coast, Erruas reflects that the sea in between these continents ‘feels more and more like an open-air cemetery’. In Sable Mouvant we see these ideas manifest as cartographical abstraction, where notions of displacement and belonging negotiate a labyrinth comprising hundreds of small shards of paper punctuated by elegant yet agitated metal threads. These geographical bodies are then bestowed with a very human touch through Distance 1, 2, and 3 – three works taking their departure from the sinuous energy of Sable Mouvant yet with the distinct introduction of small eyes. Eyes abound in Erruas’s overall oeuvre as both local and universal representations of humanity, the body, and memories, as well as a tool for endowing viewers with a visceral impression of looking versus being looked at, and the multiplicity of gazes in between those two states.
Gharib is a unique disruption of Erruas’s characteristic aesthetic language in its use of directly depicting a specific word. Here, topography meets typography to activate the nuance of etymological meanings. In particular, Gharib in Arabic translates to both ‘stranger’ and ‘strange’ – a duality at once historically topical and deeply personal with regards to notions of xenophobia, borders, and a search for belonging permeating our current global landscape. In a gesture of clarity and cacophony, Sur Ma Peau marries these technical and conceptual references through an expression of geometric abstraction that engenders mapping as both a geographical and corporeal presence, where bodies of the artist, women, immigrants, diasporas, nations, and lands all function as barriers through which the interior conflates with the exterior, and violence can be met with resistance. Finally, this is physically manifested in Terra, where a congestion of sharp needles lead outwards into a meditative radiation of meandering paper pieces – a spiritual sense of infinity.
‘The question of geographic and territorial representations has always seemed vast and complex to me,’ the artist says. ‘It solicits notions of attribution, displacement, delocalization, and closure... Appealing to this mapping imagery suggests a double sentiment of belonging and independence. The works generally start from a personal point of view regarding the instability of humans in their territory and the choice of being in that place.’ And yet while Erruas’s works brim with a sense of individual experience and intimate reflection, they remain ambiguous gestures rather than pointed statements – a suggestion, question, or invitation rather than a claim or answer. The pieces in this exhibition communicate as vessels for energy and memory ranging from pain to endurance. They are starting points for us all to reflect on our personal wounds and collective struggles in a human history tenuously oscillating between resistance, resolution, and the potential hope of new horizons.
