The series of drawings Latency is made of the interweaving of transparent bubbles and milky foams. To realize these drawings, I make a very simple gesture: I draw a circle on a glass plate with a paintbrush soaked in milk. This circle, more or less perfect, is of variable size. After this first motion, the paintbrush will not be used anymore.

When the milk evaporates, it flows back leaving a thin lamella of curds, a translucent barely visible halo. Once the halo is formed, I make a tricky rotary move on the glass plate. With each rotation, the milk operates a circular motion leaving a filament of curd cheese. Each rotation leads the milk to the tracks left by the previous line and progressively forms concentric furrows.

The drawing is based on waiting, as a form of controlled withdrawal. I draw by worming my way in the folds, inscribing the lines in the slipstream of the ellipses printed by the liquid. After drawing the circle with a paintbrush, the drawing is gradually put into the orbit of this first impulsion.

It is a sort of drawing by gravitation. 

These drawings are latent images because they are slow to appear. The act of drawing is done slowly, waiting for the milk to evaporate and reveal its grooves. This process is reminiscent of mineral concretions, sedimentary drawings, the grooves of trees, or the concentric scars of fossils and shells. These grooves are slow temporal markers. The drawing proceeds by sedimentation; the longer the fermentation, the more furrows accumulate.

Moons, stars, galaxies, specters, eggs, jellyfish, foam, seascape… These drawings sketch the ethereal outlines of an organic manifestation. As a translucent matter, almost transparent when it is wet, the milk gives a ghostly aspect to these drawings.

The glass plate used as a support may not be photosensitive, but it turns out to be a hypersensitive screen. It resembles daguerreotypes (disposable surfaces of apparition) because of their fragility and shiny aspect. Latency reveals the obscure depths of the black that, far from the blindness it creates, reveals apparitions and tenuous splinters on the glass surface. Drawing boils down to drawing a line of the night, making black a subtle revelator, the shaman of latent images. Ismaïl Bahri