Matter as Passage: The Philosophy of Void in Khourassani's Work
In my work, matter is never an end in itself: it is a passage toward what cannot be seen, a space where void becomes presence and surface becomes depth.
There is a question that recurs constantly in conversations with collectors and critics who stop in front of my canvases: 'What is happening inside?' The question is right, and it touches something essential in my approach. I do not seek to represent the world — I seek to capture its resonances. Matter in my work, whether cellulosic paint on canvas or on aluminium, is not a passive support. It is the place where something happens, transforms, passes from one state to another. The void one perceives on the surface of a work is not an absence: it is a compressed presence, a held tension.
This philosophy of matter as passage draws from several sources. Sufi thought, first, with its meditation on the barzakh — that intermediate space between two states that is neither one nor the other, yet contains both. Classical Arabic poetry next, which knows how to make the silence between words the most charged place in a poem. And the pictorial tradition of the Casablanca School, where Belkahia and Hamidi taught me that a painted surface could be a site of spiritual concentration as much as an aesthetic object. These influences do not add up: they merge into a coherent vision where matter carries the invisible within it.
Cellulosic paint is particularly well suited to this inquiry. Its relative transparency, its way of drinking light and releasing it from within the layer, creates a depth effect that is not illusionistic. It is not a window opened onto a fictional space — it is a real, thick presence that has its own life. When I apply successive layers, I am not seeking a precise colour: I am seeking to build a density, a temporal texture, a stratum of accumulated time. Each work is an archive of the process that created it.
The dialogue between matter and void takes on a particular dimension when I work on aluminium. The metal introduces a coldness, an impersonality that contrasts with the organic warmth of paint. But it is precisely this tension that interests me. Aluminium resists absorption — the paint stays on the surface, more vulnerable, more exposed. The void between layers becomes more visible, more active. Collectors who own works on aluminium often tell me that the painting changes depending on the time of day, on artificial or natural light. This is not a decorative effect: it is matter that lives, breathes, passes.
This exploration of void is not a theoretical abstraction: it engages my body in the act of painting. I work standing, often moving around the canvas, seeking the angle from which light reveals what the layer hides. It is a dance, a physical negotiation with matter. The philosophy of void is not an idea I apply — it is an experience I live in the studio, and which I hope the viewer will rediscover in front of the work. The passage I speak of is not only in the surface: it is in the gaze that travels through it.
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