Driss Ouadahi: Another Place, Another Me

In his first solo exhibition on the West Coast, Düsseldorf-based painter Driss Ouadahi draws upon a lifelong interest in architecture to create a language of structure and abstraction.

Layers of broad brushstrokes define the geometries of glassy high-rise buildings. The rigor of the modernist grid is made sensuous through the reflection of light and color. However, while the lushness of the paint seduces, the interiors of the ostensibly transparent buildings remain impenetrable.

Ouadahi, a Moroccan-born immigrant to Europe, frequently paints the buildings found on the outskirts of cities like Paris and Berlin. These are the apartments built to accommodate growing immigrant populations.

The reflective surfaces of Ouadahi’s buildings are boundaries, calling attention to the politics of class, religion and ethnicity and the failed Utopian promises of Western modernism.