Chahrazed Fekih | Apis Mellifica : l’Éveil à l’infiniment Vivant

Chahrazed Fekih had previously brought us to the awareness of a world that, in the Anthropocene era, we generally overlook and pay little attention to: the world of the infinitesimal. With the pandemic, the overwhelming power of nature and the vanity of the profoundly self-centred human condition became undeniable, as our lives came to a standstill. We were introduced to a graphic universe in which the human hand served nature, insects and plants. Today, her artistic universe undergoes a semantic shift, placing insects at its centre, with which she has developed a particularly intimate relationship.

It is all a matter of perspective, of looking, and of acceptance. The dialogue works both ways, and one senses that the artist is deeply inhabited by these new companions on her journey. Working in black and white, with pencil and ink-drawing techniques, she constructs anatomical representations in which the entomological, beyond its natural scale, merges with the human. Her delicate collages, meticulously drawn and executed with remarkable precision and rigour, bring an additional layer of refinement to an already powerful graphic body of work, expressing both the vulnerability and the overwhelming power of nature.

— Edia Lesage, *The Tiny Colossi of Chahrazed Fekih*, October 2022.