Youssef Lakhrif

Casablanca → New York City → San Diego

I was given two alphabets and never learned to choose.

The first was Casablanca, where I was born and lived until I was sixteen. Arabic and Amazigh, a French education, Art Deco poured over older ground. A city that was already plural before I left it. American and French pop culture arrived on the same airwaves, so America reached me before I reached it.

At sixteen I left for the United States. New York became the second alphabet: abstraction, street marks, text scrawled on steel. Years that ran on trains, long commutes across the metropolitan area, and nights tending bar across Manhattan, where I learned to read people before I had the language for them. I studied fine art at Rutgers University, graphic design focus with a minor in art history, and the graphic precision and the street chaos learned to share a surface.

In 2018 I moved to San Diego, and the noise fell away. The coast rhymes with the one I was born on, and the distance from both cities is what lets me hear them. It is the calmest room I have ever had, for the loudest material of my life.

Two cities of density and noise, a generation and an ocean apart. They do not translate. I stopped asking them to.

Acrylic, oil, oil pastel, spray paint, metallics on canvas. Sometimes a knife. Sometimes the back of a hand. Sometimes nothing but time and the surface deciding what it wants to be. A face, an eye, a figure, fragments of script surface inside the field, not as illustration but as what memory looks like when it interrupts.

I do not resolve the tension between my cities. I keep it on one surface.