Yassine Balbzioui, a versatile artist born in 1972 in Morocco, stands out for his innovative use of media and his challenge to conventions. During the 1990s, he took a variety of art courses and earned several degrees, including an MFA from the École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca in Morocco, as well as a National Diploma of Art and a Higher National Diploma in Plastic Expression from the École des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux in France. In 2001 and 2002, he pursued training in arts and media at the University of Berkeley in California (USA) as part of the “education abroad program”.
Balbzioui is fascinated by the theme of the mask, which plays a central role in his work. He believes that society is often based on appearances. He says: “We increasingly live in a society that tries to hide its true nature behind lies. Everyone adopts a false identity.” His works constantly invite the viewer to question notions of sincerity and hypocrisy, or truth and lies.
The absence of a human face in Yassine’s work is striking; his paintings are populated with animals and birds, often referencing the bestiary, and depict stories or scenes based on the animals’ characteristics and their similarities to human behaviors and traits. “The animal is a creature that resembles us, but also where we find attributes that are increasingly absent in humans, such as gentleness or nobility,” says the artist. His works explore the idea of “being” and “appearing” through the form of masks, and how our choices and actions are sometimes influenced more by primitive instincts than by considered decisions. With this technique, the oil paintings in his work feature chameleons, referencing how Indians learn to adapt to all situations.
His work develops around different axes: essentially a painter and designer, he develops, in a neo-expressionist vein, a production of great formal and semantic richness, in which the representation of human animality, most often under the covered with the mask, crosses the notions of derision, idiocy, grotesque, understood as artistic postures. In a distanced spirit, close to fluxus simplicity (although without formal connection with this movement), his theatrical work highlights in a radical and systematic way the “spirit of seriousness”, and strives, with a vitalism never denied and raw energy, mixing art and life.
If everyday life remains his main source of inspiration, a daily life constantly shifted under his unusual gaze, Yassine Balbzioui interferes with numerous worlds, those of cinema – Z series and horror films -, theater and dance, tales and legends…Everything is conducive to feeding one’s insatiable imagination. In perpetual research, he also develops work in various mediums: sculpture, ceramics, photographs, installations, video. Frequently putting himself on stage, he also deploys an important activity as a performer, in which we can observe the full extent of his madness!
Recently selected by Simon Njami for the 12th Dakar Biennial (Senegal), Yassine Balbzioui has, for fifteen years, exhibited his work all over the world: in France (Paris, and notably in 2014-2015 at the Institut du Monde Arabic for the panorama exhibition “Contemporary Morocco”, but also Bordeaux, Montluçon or Nantes), in Morocco (in the inaugural exhibition of the Mohammed VI Museum, in 2014, but also in Casablanca, Rabat, Essaouira), in Germany ( Bayreuth, Stuttgart, Berlin), the Netherlands (Amsterdam), Mexico, Italy (Cagliari, Sardinia, Milan) Spain, Bamako Mali. His career is punctuated by numerous artistic residencies in various creative venues abroad, including, recently, Trident Space in Hyderabad, India, and this year 2024 at Port Tonic Art Center.
His works have been included in several private and public collections, including that of the Bank Al-Maghrib Museum, in Rabat (Morocco) and the Alliances Foundation (Morocco).