Farid Belkahia

Curator Statement

by Salah Hassan

Farid Belkahia is one of the most influential artists whose creative achievements and active personal intervention have transformed and continued to define the contemporary art movement in Morocco since the early 1960s. Unlike his predecessors within the modernist experience in Morocco, Belkahia did not engage in art as a mere academic exercise, nor did he uncritically accept what he learned of the western modernist tradition. He is among the pioneers who developed a new visual vocabulary of iconography, symbolism and technique. He grew up at a time when the struggle for national independence was at its peek and the intellectual ferment which accompany it was enormous. Born in Marrakech in 1934, Belkahia studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris between 1954 and 1959, before traveling to Prague and enrolled at the Institute of Theatre between 1959 and 1962. He also spent a year of study between 1965 and 1966 at the Academia Brera in Milano, Italy.

Upon his return to Morocco from study abroad, Belkahia, among other artists such Mohammed Melehi, Gharbaoui, and Cherkaoui, rebelled against the structural anachronisms and provincial character of the art scene. Responding to a historical need and as a reaction to the local situation, this group of artists have become the promoters of a new movement beginning with the Ecole des Beaux Arts (the School of Fine Art) in Casablanca under the directorship of Belkahia after his return from Prague in 1962. This movement saw itself as the artistic conscience of the time. They criticized the politics of dependency on the foreign cultural missions which assumed the role of patronage of the modern art in Morocco. They also criticized the lack of adequate facilities and poor artistic management. Together with his colleagues, he organized independent exhibitions and initiated a debate on the theory and practice of art education in Morocco. At the School of Fine Art, he worked very hard to liberalize the syllabus and the teaching system in the school, sparing his students the rigidity of the methods he experienced in France. It is to his credit that Belkahia initiated and pursued a serious research which draw attention to the potent modernity of some forms of the traditional and popular art. He set up workshops at the School on the history and practice of Moroccan traditional crafts, from weaving, carpet and rug-making, and gold or silver jewelry to pottery.

Belkahia's endeavor was motivated by his keen interest in memory which tend to play a central role in his creative process. As he often proclaims, "it is only though our past that we can accede to modernity. I know of no ahistroical modernity." It was in this spirit that he organized the first street exhibition, setting out works in a public square, as he did in Marrakech in 1969 in the square of the Fana'a mosque. It was an experiment which was emulated by several of his colleagues and intended to transcend art as an elitist practice isolated from the rest of other daily social activities, and redeem it as it used to be. The popular success of the experiment made the Moroccan authorities grew suspicious of its intent and became reluctant to allow more of such displays. Belkahia went further in asking more fundamental questions. He questioned the artistic form, its origins and aesthetic sources: Why the painted canvas? Why producing art works based on foreign aesthetic concepts? Why should Moroccan artists import tubes of chemically-based colors and ignore their own naturally-based local colors? Why paint on canvases stretched on square or rectangular frames of wood with right angles, instead of paint and dye on wood, pottery and lamb skin? In that spirit, Belkahia stopped painting with oil on canvas or paper and started working with traditional Moroccan material such as copper, lamb skin, henna, saffron and other local and natural dyes, which have become central to his creative expression and identity as artist for over two decades.

Earlier on, Belkahia experimented with red and yellow copper, which he regards as a sacred material. He started with copper leaf which he folds or hammers and mount on wood. Molded copper as opposed to sculpted one, allowed him to break from the traditional square and rectangle, creating dynamic forms charged with unlimited energy.

Since 1975, and just at the time of leaving the directorship of the School of Fine Art, Belkahia started to work on lamb skin braced on wood. He was compelled to skin by the range of possibilities it allows him and the challenges it poses for him as an artist. Symbolically, as he argues, it is close to the body and the sacred. Used raw, washed, treated and dried in a shade, lamb skin can only be dyed with natural pigments such as henna, which gives a range of colors from the reds and browns to the dark browns. The choice of such colors are motivated by his desire to be close to earthy colors. His techniques evoke traditional ones, such as tattooing and those of Moroccan women's art of body decoration. Moreso, his use of traditional material is an act of memory. The recessive qualities of lamb skin as a medium reminiscent of parchment, symbolically allows it to carry the memories and traces of earlier times. However, Belkahia's use of skin causes the viewer to suspend the references to tradition and memory of the past, and think, instead, of a forward looking modernism. The kind of modernism rooted in the Moroccan experience which Belkahia still struggles to define.

Belkahia's works,Jerusalem, and Procession II, represented in the exhibition, are obvious products of memory. Evident in these works, is his obsessive use of the circle and arrows which becomes a kind of personal insignia throughout his career. The series of circular painting in Procession creates an interesting tension with the movement of the arrows and the triangular forms. Saturated with symbolic signs and characters borrowed from the Tifinagh (the Tuareq and Berber alphabet), the arrows, in the words of Benchemsi, contained in primordial circles directs our gaze "towards an obvious duality: up and down, movement and immobility, life and death." The tattooed and dyed surfaces are often balanced with smooth fissures that suggest primordial and almost organic unity between the separated sections. Jerusalem, with its upward forms rising high against a background of blue and pure skies as if to penetrate the mystique of this ancient city, is more than a political statement. It is a homage to memory, to the charged and powerful emotion which Belkahia felt upon visiting a city where memory is crystallized through organized strata borne out of centuries of relics of belief systems, of movements of conquerors, and of changes of prophets and religions.

Belkahia continues to explore the primeval memory, remaining true to his creative and adventurous spirit. In his work, one can easily observe the power of the form and the metaphor of sign existing in constant state of flux, and in dialogue with the surface of the form and its depth. At various stages of his career, Belkahia created rich and intense work fundamental to the renewal of Morocco modernist art experience. If anything, his work remains an affirmation of Morocco's modern energy and powerful artistic traditions.

Bibliographies/Artists

1. Farid Belkahia:

Artistes pour la Paix: Rachid Koraichi, Farid Belkahia. Lunel, 15émes Rencontres Méditerranéennes, 1997

Sijelmassi, Mohammed, A Khatibi and B. Alaoui. L'Art Contemporain du Maroc. Paris: Courbevoie, 1989

Art Contemprain Arabe: Collection du Musée Institut du Monde Arabe (Brahim Alaoui). Paris (no. date), pp. 90-91.

Sijelmassi, Mohammed. Moroccan Painting. Paris: J.P. Taillandier, 1971, 1996

Farid Belkahia. Paris, Le Havre,Maison de la Culture du Havre, Le Havre/Institut du Monde Arabe, 1986

Peintres du Maroc. Paris Institut du Monde Arabe, 1991

Peinture et Mecenat: une collection marocaine. Casablanca: Banque Commericale du Maroc, 1992.

Revue Noire, no. 12, March-April-May 1994, pp. 8-11

Recontres Africaines, Paris: Institut du Maonde Arabe, 1994

VITAL: Three Contemporary African Artists, Liverpool: tate Gallery, 1995

Wijdan Ali (ed.) Contemporary Art from the Islamic World. London, Amman: The Royal Society of Fine Arts, 1989, pp. 211-218.