During the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Marrakech, Niko Goffin visited numerous exhibitions by African and African diaspora artists across the city. Yet one of the most resonant encounters occurred in the industrial outskirts of Sidi Ghanem, where MCC Gallery presents Red Burn (open until March 30th ), a solo exhibition by Salma Cheddadi.

A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy, Cheddadi has cultivated a multidisciplinary practice encompassing film, drawing, painting, sculpture, and documentary. While her chosen mediums vary, her inquiry remains constant: a persistent exploration of the latent animality within the human condition and the fragile boundary between instinct and consciousness, nature and culture. In February 2026, as her documentary Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire de toi? premieres in Paris, Cheddadi simultaneously presents her renewed focus on painting at the gallery in Morocco.

In Red Burn, she reclaims the gaze. Male bodies, rendered with tactile intimacy and saturated in burning constellations of red, become objects of desire rather than subjects. Through gestures that oscillate between realism and dissolution, Cheddadi constructs a sensual yet quiet language — one where tenderness disrupts virility and intimacy resists performance.

In Red Burn, you overturn a long pictorial tradition. Male bodies become objects of desire, looked at by a woman. Where does this gesture come from?

For centuries, art history has been filled with women lying down, offered to the male gaze—languid, silent, often half-naked. In painting, they exist like landscapes to be contemplated, rarely as desiring subjects. I wanted—and even needed—to shift that gaze. To turn it around. To let female desire exist on the canvas.

It is still a rare image, almost absent, in contemporary art. And for me, as a Moroccan woman from an Arab-Muslim culture, this gesture carries a transgressive dimension. It is not only about representing desire, but above all about showing it from a female point of view. Perhaps despite myself, it becomes a political stance. A way of saying: this gaze exists, it has the right to be seen, and I want to contribute to its emergence.

Your models are men from your own circle. How is that sense of closeness built into your working process?

I spend time with them. They are friends, people close to me. We share an evening, a conversation, a simple moment of complicity. Then I photograph them. I needed to start from reality to capture this intimacy accurately.

Before that, I painted faceless bodies—dreamlike, almost mythological, like apparitions out of time. It was poetic, but strangely distant. Without identity, I felt no closeness to them. So, I chose realism, to move closer, to offer the viewer the same sense of intimacy that I feel with my models.

In my paintings, it is always about distance: between the one who looks and the one who is looked at. In a way, that is the whole history of art. I try to make it into an almost haptic painting, where the gaze becomes a caress.

In your paintings we notice contrasts between very realistic areas and others that seem almost dissolved in the paint.

Yes, some fragments are almost photographic, while others are just sketches, flat areas, or drips. It creates a sense of focus—perhaps because I come from cinema. The face is often sharp, and the rest becomes an apparition.

The transparencies, the brush marks, the drips—for me, these are gestures of tenderness. A way of conveying the sensation of touch, of caress. These are sensual paintings, but with a gentle, almost silent sensuality.

And I also wanted to show an image of masculinity that escapes virile performance. These men are not effeminate; they are simply masculine in another way: without display, without hardness. In an era saturated with discourse about toxic masculinity, I want to remind us that tenderness is possible. I love men, and I feel no shame or hesitation in saying so—or in painting them.

Red saturates the exhibition. Why this burning palette?

It is not just one red, but a constellation of reds, oranges, and pinks. These are the colors of desire, of war, of blood, of violence. But I wanted to see something else in them: a nocturnal warmth, a gentle burn.

Red Burn evokes the trace left by light—or by another person’s skin—after exposure. Like an imprint. But the imprint of what? Love, sunlight, painting, art history? Perhaps all of these at once. What the body carries, despite itself.

These fluorescent pigments, these electric reds, also come from our contemporary world. They belong to our screens, our saturated images, the artificial light that surrounds us. I wanted to appropriate them, to bring them into painting, because they are part of my visual landscape.

In each canvas, there are small clues of the present: a tattoo, a pair of Adidas shorts, a Cartier ring, a cigarette. They are signs of a time, traces of reality. They affirm that these men exist. And it is within this reality that intimacy can arise.

You are presenting this work in Marrakech, as part of the 1-54 contemporary African art fair. How do you experience your presence?

It feels like being in the wright place. I am a woman, African, Arab-Muslim. But I didn’t want to “perform” an expected Moroccanness, to produce an image that conforms to what the West might want to see of us.

What moves me about this fair is that it allows another history to be written. A history in which African art is no longer peripheral, but central. Where we can formulate a way of thinking that is our own, based on our concerns, our desires, our contradictions.

It is time to step out of the Orientalist straitjacket. To shift the images. To show that we are not what is expected of us.

And I am very happy to exhibit here, at MCC Gallery, alongside artists such as Sanae Araqas. In her work, there is a question of intimacy and color that touches me deeply. She is part of a global art practice, and perhaps that is the true purpose of painting: to create connections, gazes, and shared burns.