Rachid Koraïchi

by Salah Hassan

Rachid Koraïchi is a truly cosmopolitan artist who speaks to a universal audience with visions rooted in his own culture and situated within a global modernism. He aesthetics is deeply rooted in his multicultural Algerian heritage, and his art demonstrates a tremendous awareness of the most recent currents in the international contemporary art scene. Like many other Algerian artists, writers and scholars who are forced into exile by the recent Islamic fundamentalist threat, he now lives and works in the Medina of Tunis in Tunisia. His artistic training includes, among studies in various schools, diplomas from the Higher Institute of Fine Art in Algeria, and the Superior National School of Arts, the National School of Decorative Arts, and the School of Urban Studies in Paris.

As described by Rose Issa, Koraïchi's works "evoke a scenography saturated by signs and writings." He sees in calligraphy a plastic force capable of forging an innovative and powerful language. The signs and symbols in his works range from Arabic and Berber and Tuareg's Tifinagh characters, magical squares and talismanic numbers, to imaginary Chinese and Japanese ideograms. Born into a Sufi family in Ain Beida, Algeria in 1947, Koraïchi's fascination with signs and symbols comes as a natural inclination. Since his early childhood, he was immersed in writing, illuminated pages, talismans, calligraphy reeds, traditional ink, parchment paper, clayed wood and the likes. It is the company of those things, their scents, and fragrances, has left an indelible marks on his mind. However, the repertory of signs and symbols in his work includes a period of time much earlier than the rising of Judaio-Christian and Islamic religion, and encompasses tradition beyond the Islamic world. One could easily see in his work the traces of elegant strokes, scenes, and rhythmic signs of the ancient rock painting of Tassilli N'Ajir in the southern part of today's Algeria. These signs and symbols are what Koraïchi refers to as the "alphabet of memory." A memory that transcends the boundaries of space and time, and in which the sacred and the profane converge into one. And we do know that, as he once proclaimed, "secular objects become liturgical instruments at a time."

To express his fascination with the script and signs, Koraïchi experimented with variety of media and techniques, including paper silk, glass, ceramic, engraving on bronze, steel, tapestry and scroll like silk banners. Koraïchi rejects the limitation of easel painting, freeing himself from the boundary of the canvas. Hence, the avoidance of color especially in his graphics work, or in the seven silk screen banners and the black steel amulets represented in the exhibition. He prefers dramatic contrasts of black and white or blue and gold, and monochromic engraved black steel, to avoid distraction from the seriousness of messages embedded in his work. Confident of his strong lines and strokes, Koraïchi employs calligraphy in an abstract symbolic manner turning his alphabets, at once, into an aesthetic and ideological acts. Beneath his strong bold lines, we find contemporary political writings and poetry superimposed and surrounded by talismanic and cabalistic messages, circles and crosses. As often, his work becomes an elegant statement of beauty and ideological act of protest and revolution. It also becomes a humanistic reference, and as Koraïchi proclaims, "a comprehensive one, readable by an Inuit, a Mesopotamian or an African."

The references and influences in Koraïchi's work are many. He belongs to a new generation of Algerian artists who intend to break with the earlier ones, and determined to set a new discourse and rearrange the way artistic production has been organized in Algeria. Personified by Koraïchi among other compatriots such as Ouadahi, Mouhoubi, and Salah, this generation of artists aspire to work within an international context and have been open to all possibilities of contemporary art. They are influenced by the European as well as African and other artistic traditions. Above all, Koraïchi has a tremendous respect for the great craftsmen (whom he prefers to call artists and consider the term 'craftsmen' a misnomer) of his country and others, whether they are blacksmith, weavers or potters. It is the memory of craftsmen which interest him. He takes pride in collaborating with them as he did in his series of silk screen banners. Starting from a hank of silk, he collaborated with dyers and weavers, dyeing in indigo, in spinning, and in weaving loom. He prepared the precise graphics with a golden acrylic painting to rigidify the space for the patterns and left them for the craftsman to embroider. It is a collaboration which becomes for him a re-routing of a technique into another type of creativity.

The multiple references in Koraïchi's work reflect the diversity of his cultural background and his global awareness of world arts. In his highly conceptual works one could easily witness the convergence of Arabo-Berber, African and Islamic heritage and awareness of western modernist's conventions. In the pagan installation which he executed in the old amphitheater of Carthage in Tunis in 1993, Tuareg singers and dancers, and Spanish and Corsican dancers, all performed against a background of texts by Algerian writers, Inca rain sticks, silk tapestries, obelisks, of his own works creating a carnavalesque atmosphere of contrasting colors, movements and sounds.

The political nature of Koraïchi's work, which does not necessarily overshadow his aesthetic and artistic concerns, stems from his active involvement in the struggle for democracy and human rights in his country Algeria. Together with other Algerian intellectuals, artists, writers and filmmakers, Koraichi is involved in defending civil liberties in Algeria from state of siege created by the violent confrontation between the militant Muslim fundamentalists, and the alliance of the corrupt ruling class and the military.

Bibliographies/Artists:

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

Art Contemprain Arabe: Collection du Musée Institut du Monde Arabe (Brahim Alaoui). Paris (no. date), pp.132-133.

Revue Noire, no. 12, March-April-May 1994, pp. 26-28

Recontres Africaines, Paris: Institut du Maonde Arabe, 1994

Wijdan Ali (ed.) Contemporary Art from the Islamic World. London, Amman: The Royal Society of Fine Arts, 1989, pp.13-20.

Rose Issa. Signs, Traces and Calligraphy: Five Contemporary Artists from North Africa. London: Concourse Gallry, Barbican Centre, 1995