Engraver by training, Aïcha Snoussi is recognised for her large-scale, site-specific graphic ink murals drawn directly onto gallery and museum walls. In her scaled-down works conducted in sketchbooks, the paper is lacerated, tortured and punctured as though it were a skin.
The ink, the lead, the black stone, the metallic tip, cut the flat surface as one would peel off the epidermis. Drawing is slipping under the skin. The trace of the line, in the grip of the gesture, rubs the paper and detaches the layers. Drawing is what is underneath-not the sketch of the painter buried beneath the pigments-but the flesh and the humours, the viscosities, the osseous structures. Nerves, blood, muscles, fats, bones, ligaments, organs, and cartilages, are removed by delicate, precise, lively gestures, extracts what is inside, and exposes fragments of the body, rejected at the surface. The paper or the wall becomes the playground of the draftsman and surgeon operating in vivo, between the layers, in the strata
Aïcha Snoussi’s cahiers or notebooks are an encyclopedia of anti-knowledge. The set of notebooks functions as a machine to unbind established norms, rooted knowledge. By precise and obsessive processes, a series of manipulations opens, expands and reinvents forms, as though a surgery on a dissection table. The tip of the felt extracts what is inside and outside the body fragments, protruding, viscous masses, a set of heteroblastic and protean elements in which the organic and the machine endlessly interlock. The drawing is carried out by methods of contamination, by an obsession of the erotic flesh in its embrace with death and pain, it is also a tool of deconstruction. Deconstruction of the polished body, deconstruction of the subject by the bursting of the organs.
