Born in 1954 in Rabat, Youssef Amghar is a Franco-Moroccan artist who divides his creative time between the radiant light of northern Morocco in Moulay-Bousselham and the cloudy skies of the French Atlantic coast.

After studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Youssef Amghar studied literature at Paris XIII and took photography courses at EFET. Artist, poet, and novelist, Youssef Amghar is a complete artist, but it's his blue-tinged poetry, expressed in his cyanotypes, that won us over at Esther & Paul.

“Cyanotype, a photograph using an ancestral process, azure, as if to ward off the patina of time.

For me, cyanotype is like a return to my roots in every sense of the word. A return to a time when images were subject to chance, to probability, almost to chance. An image is revealed by light; it is as if tamed, coaxed, desired, and time and patience are its stimuli. An image is made and experienced like a journey, a journey between the lines, in an atmosphere, in the interstices of movement. Cyanotype allows me to experience the time of the construction of an image, a time that is necessarily slow, necessarily uncertain, a time where the possible vies with the probable for its presence.

I dig into the paper some of my encounters, a paper that I insolate myself as if to give a bed, a field, a construction site to my impressions, to my own presence in the world. I invite the light of day to come and fertilize this paper to reveal the image that is impregnated with it. It is an ancient kitchen, a sort of magic pot in which I dip my imagination as one dips one's pen in ink carefully refined by time.