The artistic confinement of Fatna Chanane

Fatna Chanane exhibits her work at the Martin Alonso Pinzon Hotel in Mazagón, the city where she found herself confined. Backstage.

“This pandemic at Covid-19 has pushed us into a corner. For some, it triggered the worst… We have learned, in pain, that we are not ALL fit to be locked up. It has also taught us to reconsider the very concept of freedom itself. Is it about leaving your home, your town, your country? Is our freedom conditioned by our movements? “These are the questions of Fatna Chanane, a Moroccan painter guided by her introspection and intuition, but also by a special look at the “things” of life, a look in which each feeling takes on a colour and in which each movement of the body is transformed, over the course of a lifetime, into a frozen lament. This has revived the symbols of life, history and continents, through canvases that invite not only to travel, but also to questioning and awareness. The choice of her colours and materials is never insignificant because Fatna Chanane never lets herself be impressed by any fashionable artistic movement. For her, painting is just another language, open to all interpretations.

In the labyrinth of feelings, the artist chose not to follow the Ariadne’s thread and to face the Minotaur that exists in each of us. His paintings embody his salvation and that of everyone. Blocked, from the very beginning of the confinement more than four months ago in Spain, the artist found herself with her son wandering in the immensity of a hotel complex in Mazagón, Andalusia, and decided to take advantage of this experience for a new surge of creativity. With this forced confinement, this Spanish exile, Fatna Chanane created a universe inhabited by new forms, new souls, invited to move in a new decor, that of a hotel transformed into a fortress. A dungeon from which we hear the laments of a woman held far from her family. And in a spirit of sharing, because an artist is never “complete” without these foreign glances which are posed on his creations, Fatna Chanane has decided to exhibit her works born from her forced exile in the hotel where she has taken up residence for the last four months. Entitled “Confined Symphony”, this individual exhibition of 32 paintings is an invitation to travel in a situation where travel is not allowed. An invitation to change one’s perspective on what makes our freedom, our weakness transformed into strength… into creation. The new works of Fatna Chanane are shouting reality, but also dreams. Bodies are changing to offer us the most beautiful dance. Until August 5, Spaniards can discover the works of Fatna Chanane in the lobby of the Hotel Martin Alonso Pinzon in the coastal city of Mazagón. The profits from these paintings will be used to finance educational and solidarity actions carried out by the Tamoune association in Ouirgane, which works in favour of primary schools in the village of Ksar Azekout, in the south of Morocco, and on the island of Gorée in Senegal.