Humans pro­gres­sively dis­ap­peared whilst ani­mals and plants loomed from that same night. Their pres­ence is so sig­nif­i­cant that you can almost touch them or skim them with the eyes. There is no hyper-realism in all this, not even ‘realism’, in the tra­di­tional sense of that word: every­thing hap­pens as if he was re-inventing, with each line, nature, a sort of ency­clo­pedia of nat­ural phe­nomena which is done with care and at a slow pace. His vision is so intense that you have the impres­sion of waking up from a dream when looking at his works. It is as if you had never really seen, in depth and in relief, what a simple fish is.

Abdelke pen­e­trates the skull, or the fish, or a woman’s shoe, just like Michaux ‘entered’ in an apple. Maybe he had ripped apart the fish before recon­sti­tuting it. Hence he never ‘rep­re­sents’ the fish, the woman’s shoe or the ox’s skull : he res­sus­ci­tates them. This is his power to fas­ci­nate : every­thing is des­tined to die and to dis­ap­pear, yet every­thing can be saved, as if from a deluge. Each living phe­nomenon is a mate­rial mir­acle, a trea­sure and an enigma. Such a sur­prise it is when you redis­cover it ! I do not know how he man­ages in order to reach it. Observation and the utmost atten­tion are not enough. Everything hap­pens as if he wanted to re-invent the world, pro­tect it for good from offence, indif­fer­ence and omis­sion. It is as if he was him­self dead in front of the ox’s skull and that he wanted all living phe­nomena to replace him, the Syrian engraver. It is not ‘Abdelke’ who inter­ests him but rather every­thing that Abdelke isn’t, every­thing that will sur­vive to Abdelke and every­thing that goes beyond, far beyond, Abdelke.

I am sure that Baudelaire would have been impressed by his engrav­ings and that he would have ded­i­cated them poems and enthu­si­astic texts. There will always be day, night, and light, at least for another couple of bil­lion years or so, and there will always be dark­ness. It is in that light and in that dark­ness that Abdelke works, sim­ilar to a candle’s glimmer, a simple little candle, flick­ering in its candle-holder. When he reaches this result, which I call res­ur­rec­tion, he smiles, he is happy, he stops and puts down his chisel ; no point in adding any­thing. It lives or it doesn’t live. It emerges, it re-emerges or it does not emerge. The entire ques­tion of art lies there. Actually, the word ‘art’ is inad­e­quate. It is not a matter of art, but rather of a meta­mor­phosis of death into a live exis­tance. Abdelke’s fish is not a fish : it is an arrow, a beam, a breath, a whis­pered call to life. Yet it is also a fish – I don’t know maybe a salmon, a sar­dine or a pike. But it flies like a bird in the night in which we find our­selves once again immersed. In a large char­coal drawing on canvas, he drew the head of a fish in a box and that mas­sive head stares at us, as if the image of death was more alive for Abdelke than that of life. (Alain Jouffroy. French poet and Art writer)