Safaa Erruas was born in 1976 in Tétouan, Morocco.
Safaa Erruas graduated from the Institut National des Beaux-Arts de Tétouan in 1998. Shortly after graduating, the artist developed an original, long-term artistic practice.
Using intuition as much as formal research as a source of creation, the artist uses meticulous, ritualized gestures to create works on paper and installations that appeal to the viewer's various senses. Between the visible and the invisible, consciousness and unconsciousness, gentleness and violence, her works are windows onto worlds in tension that challenge and question us in our deepest intimacy.
Safaa Erruas' work is characterized by her use of the color white, which symbolizes absence, immateriality, transparency and fragility. As a formal composition and conceptual strategy, the neutrality implied by a single color is the starting point for mixing and transforming the objects and elements the artist uses, such as pins, needles, razor blades, cotton gauze and other everyday materials. These evoke feelings of fragility, uncertainty and sometimes hope.
In recent years, Safaa Erruas has focused on the complex interplay between sensation, perception and experience in her artistic approach. The artist sees her art as a personal exploration aimed at understanding the world and society around her, and increasingly favors in situ experiments, recognizing that she cannot control the outside world from her studio. Aware of this limitation, Safaa Erruas increasingly feels the need to infuse her work with a critical dimension, and wishes to highlight the troubling and difficult aspects of reality, rather than simply being a witness to the times in which we live.
Safaa Erruas' work has been acquired by the Fondation Jean-Paul Blachère (France), the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Toulouse (France), the Fondation H (Madagascar), the Centre d'art contemporain de Lagos (Nigeria), the Musée d'art contemporain Africain Al Maaden (Morocco), the Société Générale (Morocco), Bank Al- Maghrib (Morocco), and the Fondation ONA (Morocco), among others.
The artist lives and works in Tétouan.