Danger comes from the sky. Hope too. In the Middle Ages, celestial phenomena fed the most varied fantasies. Is it different today? The signs coming from the sky are constantly changing their meaning: we perceive them differently, we interpret them differently. Astronomy or astrology, omen or physical law, magic or science, everything is intermingled. The streaks of light can be kites or witches, UFOs or drones. Carl Jung talks about a patient's dream where a huge buzzing spider pierces across the sky. Who knows if, in the past, she hasn’t seen our current drones, remotely piloted war machines with tentacular arms that echo the sad present?

Fascinated by the issue of celeste phenomena, Abdelkader Benchamma followed the hearing of the US Congress on UFOs in November 2024. The recovered objects raised insoluble questions about their origin. Scientists and military officers followed one another, coldly giving their testimonies to elected officials from everywhere. Science fiction meets reality and conspiratorial theories turned plausible in an unsettling – or fascinating – turn of events. Was the United States preparing for a new enemy or a new market? Everything accelerates regarding our relationship with the sky. Exoplanets, non- existent thirty years ago, are now counted by millions. The sky becomes habitable, colonized by both reason and imagination. Fantasies and hypotheses unfold without limit. Are we so different from our ancestors when they read the omens?

In the Kometenbuch series, Benchamma proposes about twenty drawings inspired by a sixteenth-century book that collects various celestial phenomena, represented in strange and fascinating ways. Aby Warburg, also captivated by these illustrations, highlighted the fundamental role of comets as celestial signs. Benchamma, for his part, captures it through medium and small format drawings. This choice of scale allows exacerbating the details, to explore the negligible where essential truths are sometimes hidden.

In his previous series, he describes the abysses that suddenly open up beneath our feet, engulfing the world on the surface. Here the mystery unfolds over our heads. Under the earth or up in the air, evanescent materials and shapes dissolve in our fears and hopes. What we project on the sky is the dark side of each era, what Gastón Bachelard called the nocturnal side of humanity, that turbulent poetry, whether illuminated by the brightness of a candle or by the raw light of the spotlights. Benchamma dwells on these ancient comets, fire trails and unimaginable circles, developing their hidden shapes and meanings. He schematizes or enriches, transforming the tail of a comet into colored flames, revealing his affinity with the work of Raymond Pettibon and the tormented skies of the Joachim Patinir paintings.

Later, fifteen medium format works integrate scenes inspired by visual archives, expanding on the work initiated with Engramme. The marabout that appears in photographs or old postcards of Algeria embodies the idea of passage, the central theme of the Centre Pompidou's installation for the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2024).

The marabouts represented here are figures of transition and intercession, between life and death, between parallel worlds: spiritual and terrestrial, visible and invisible. These places of worship, photographed by Westerners, would never have been immortalized by a Muslim because they are intimate and not spectacular. Benchamma reinscribes them with great fluidity, restoring their mystery, on the opposite side of the frozen image of a postcard. The tree, omnipresent, connects the subterranean world with the celestial, an archetype of mysticism where the marabout finds his place as an intercessor. Behind these postcards with innocuous messages hides a deep gap between colonial iconography and the sacred function of the marabout. The artist plays with these absences and presences, with these figures that appear or disappear, impose themselves or escape our gaze. For the first time he uses embedded canvases, giving him greater freedom in exploring color and textures, thus going beyond the tool of pure drawing.

In the mural made at ADN Galeria, Benchamma incorporates an unpublished three- minute video, from a project of a book in progress, Grottes célestes. There a celestial gap where satellites and debris float in absurd chaos is discovered, shrinking or stretching into the vastness. This sky of the future looks like a weightless dump, full of objects that have become useless. We could see there the image of a diseased cell, with white spots proliferating like bacteria or tumors in a scanner, thus transferring the celestial disorder to the human scale.

Through his work, Abdelkader Benchamma questions our relationship with the sky, with its signs and its mysteries, oscillating between knowledge and belief, between memory and anticipation. It invites us to observe these phenomena with new eyes, to rediscover the shadows and lights of our time through the traces left by others who preceded us.

(Text by Sébastien Planas)