Mustapha Azeroual confirms here his command of gum bichromate printing, which he develops as polychromes, following a colour
palette that isn’t used much and partly made up of fluorescent pigments.
The ACTIN series gathers photograms, photographs taken with no photographic camera, in which each work is the combination of several superimposed prints. Layer after layer of photosensitive emulsion, through successive tricks of covering, caps and openings, from a water bath to another, Mustapha Azeroual writes the traces of his movements on the paper. Shapes are revealed by the actinic light of the UV and accumulate in shadings of increasingly fine pigments.
Going back to the origin of photography, considering light not simply as a vector of the visible, but for itself. This is a leitmotiv in the artist’s work: to analyse light as sensitive matter and to develop shapes that will be suitable to embody it. In this research, colour is present like never before in his practice of gum bichromate. A new tendency that also seems to
be influenced by the singular Moroccan light, where the artist set up his laboratory for two years. (2018-2019).