Youssef Moukil

Youssef Moukil, originally from Casablanca and currently based in Brussels, creates iron and copper wire sculptures.

Moukil started ‘playing’ with wire when he was seven years old and he used to make his own toys. Still today, Youssef starts from the observation of his surroundings, and transforms people, animals and objects into wire creatures. In Moukil’s hands, iron wire becomes like cotton yarn with which he knits, sews, and embroiders, although his tools are gloves, pliers and pincers. The slow process of weaving the threads gives the artist the time to study and understand the figures which he brings to life. What could seem like simple grids from a distance, reveals themselves to be complex structures of knots and weaves up close.

Birds, planes, boats, dolphins, a man stepping out from a mysterious space: Moukil’s subjects reveal his predilection for symbols of movement and freedom. In his sculptures, the strength of the iron meets the delicacy of the fabrication process and the size, at times realistic and at other times completely disproportionate, make us think of children’s drawings or surreal movies where everything is possible: a world where dolphins are bigger than boats, where birds and planes of the same size can fly together in the sky or rest on a tree branch.