Based on a Text by Klaus Albrecht Schröder
In the world of Aïcha Khorchid, there are no clear borders between beauty and trauma, dream and nightmare. Her canvases don’t offer escape; they compel confrontation. Yet, it is precisely in this confrontation that her art achieves something extraordinary: it renders the unspeakable not only visible, but devastatingly beautiful.
“Every painting is a wound made visible.”
Is it even possible to speak of “a world” when that world is rooted in childhood terror, forged in violence, abandonment, and despair? Aïcha’s world is not a romantic escape into fantasy, nor an exotic reverie. It is the child’s world—both limitless in imagination and suffocating in its monsters. A world where an iron bedframe looms like a prison, where blood in the bathtub is not metaphor but memory.
Despair has never been painted more beautifully.
These memories—of loss, incarceration, and unbearable pain—are projected onto thick wooden panels, two-by-two meters in scale, as if the sheer size could bear the weight of what they must hold. Her paintings are monumental not just in form but in force: every stroke bleeds. Every composition aches. Her work emerges not from academic rigor, but from raw necessity.
“Aïcha doesn’t paint fantasy. She paints survival.”
And yet—this is not outsider art. Or at least not only. Yes, Aïcha Khorchid never studied perspective, light, or shadow. Her brush obeys no rules. She is self-taught, unfiltered, and steeped in the primal immediacy once revered in the “naïve” art of Henri Rousseau or Niko Pirosmani. But the comparison falters where her pain begins. Aïcha is not painting Sunday landscapes or poetic jungles. Her jungle is the suffocating grip of trauma. Her “naïveté” is not a stylistic choice; it is the raw language of a survivor.
Everything is oversized in Aïcha’s world—especially the pain.
Few artists command space the way Aïcha does. Her visual grammar—frontal figures, distorted proportions, compressed space—recalls the early 20th-century avant-garde’s fascination with unlearning. But hers is not affectation; it is instinct. Each painting is a battleground where figures stand frozen in hopeless confrontation. A bathtub becomes a tomb. A table, an altar of abandonment. Curtains don’t veil; they accuse.
“She didn’t choose painting. Painting chose her.”
In the world of Aïcha, beauty and pain are twin flames. As with Grünewald’s tortured Christ or Picasso’s Guernica, horror here becomes sublime. It is this paradox—despair rendered so gorgeously—that makes her work unforgettable. We look on, unable to look away.
“The viewer becomes the witness. The canvas, the crime scene.”
Born in Karachi and carried across continents—from Lebanon to France—Aïcha’s childhood was fractured early. Placed in state care as one of ten siblings in a refugee family, she moved from one foster home to another, each a new chapter of violence and psychological torment. Her adolescence was marked by survival: dropping out of school, enduring abuse, rediscovering and then losing her mother in one final, irreversible act—suicide.
Decades would pass before she ever picked up a brush. In those years, she lived many lives: a street painter on Paris pavements, an exotic dancer in the Caribbean, a decorator of domestic worlds that would never feel like home. And then—one day—she began to paint.
It was not healing. It was exorcism.
Her art draws from two wells: one filled with pain, the other with dreams of escape. Within this duality lie fleeting images of love, of peace, of some imagined refuge. But they are always fragile, always retreating. The safe space exists only to be invaded.
What Aïcha Khorchid creates is not just art—it is testimony. Her work demands we witness the pain of the voiceless child, the castaway, the forgotten. And in witnessing, we are implicated. Her abused uncle stares out from the canvas with dead eyes. We ask, “What do we want from him?”—but the better question is, “What does the painting want from us?”
To call Aïcha’s work cathartic is too easy. Catharsis implies resolution, and there is none. Her trauma is not resolved, only made visible. And maybe that’s enough. Perhaps art, at its most honest, does not heal but insists that we see.
We may recoil from her world, but we cannot deny it. We may wish to offer thanks that such suffering could lead to such profound artistic expression—but that, too, feels insufficient. Instead, we stand before her canvases, silent, unnerved, moved.
This is Le Monde d’Aïcha. Not a place to rest, but a place to feel.
Aïcha Khorchid | Les choses de la vie
May 2 – June 21, 2025
GNYP Gallery Berlin
Knesebeckstraße 96, 10623 Berlin
Thursday-Saturday, 12-6 pm
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