Hakim Abel Ben Youcef - hakeem b - is a multimedia artist and graphic designer based in Dietikon, ZH, Switzerland. After graduating from the l’École Nationale Supérieure of Art in Dijon (FR) and from Studio National des Arts Contemporains du Fresnoy in Tourcoing (FR) - promotion Sartre Beauvoir - as a student of the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, he won several international prizes for digital arts and joined renowned residencies such as La Casa de Vélazquez in Madrid (SP), La Cité Internationale des Arts of Paris (FR) or The KünstHausSchloss Balmoral in Bad Ems (GER).

RESEARCH

The artists main focus is on the tools of digital and graphic creation. The medium, be it performance, installation or simple monstration, invests different territories of reflection that prefigure the passage from our materialistic societies to that of dematerialization. Two philosophical and theoretical territories that he combines with the notions of impotence, failure and fall. In short, a research inscribed in the space-time of the contemporary world. Aesthetically, the pieces combine animations, recovery of filmic or other material from social networks, programming, digital drawing and musical compositions. An interconnection of disciplines that nourishes his visual language: a logic of co-construction of visual matter. In brief, a perpetual reconstruction of the material produced. The latter becomes the material which itself becomes a new material for reflection and creation..

Hakim Abel Ben Youcef - hakeem b - favours the notion of repetition or loop in his aesthetic research because repetition is above all an experimentation, a perpetual and incessant reset of the gesture, the form, the motif, the colour and the artist's intention.

Repetition transcends, hypnotizes, paralyzes or disgusts. Repetition becomes, in spite of itself, the main movement of our life system and our perception of the world. It is an infinite whole that begins nowhere and never ends. As such, it is the sine qua non of his aesthetic research. Another way of mapping a coherent theoretical and aesthetic whole set up in a space-time that Jean Baudrillard calls "integral reality". The repetition is then transformed into a simulacrum, into a simulation of an infernal reality. For the past 10 years, his work has focused on the fabrication of the "objectless". The project reveals itself as a minimalist experimentation of dematerialization. The creation protocol summons different modes of production.

For the artist, white and black as well as the three primary colours are the quintessence of a pragmatic vision of the world. From this begins a shaping of the visual language influenced by architecture, minimal and serialism music and design. The 1 and the 0 jostle each other in order to co-construct forms, movement, to draw from nothingness a geometry of the pixel, a real material for the creation of the work.

All the pieces integrate their presentation modes into their design: they dispense with any plinth, lighting and other art staging instrument in favor of an immediate intellectual and sensitive experience.

In summary for the artist "nothing is lost because nothing ends".