As one of the founders of the Casablanca Art School, Farid Belkahia defied entrenched pictorial traditions and defined a modernist discourse and pedagogy that are emblematic of his Moroccan heritage. His approach imperatively propelled a deliberate disruption of the conventions of art production­­ — an explicit rupture with Western referential principals, grounds and aesthetics. His commitment to interiority and identity prompted and exteriorised an exploration of materiality, that of copper.

Geometric forms became thus a leitmotif of the fundamental abstract dimension that his source yields. By plunging into this experimental route, away from any preconceived affiliations, Belkahia explains his choice of copper, which bears a decolonial stance par excellence, as follows, “I ensconce my work in a traditional practice that I question to reveal its relationship to modernity”.[1]

Through a re-appropriation of traditional arts that debunked the lineage of colonial modernist frames, his new symbolic iconography restored the sanctity of materials and the graphism used in Moroccan crafts and Islamic arts. The piece Composition (1971), which appears as a variation or a reversal of the vesica piscis, unveils a geometrisation of an internal ordering that does not centre solely on form, but rather swirls around the transcendental dimension beyond it. Belkahia posits his spiritual-aesthetic expression, one that tames and stabilises his matter’s convulsions, as a duel catharsis: “Every individual is locked into a circle, a sort of personal cosmos in which he is subjected to the pressure that comes from all directions, a pressure that is liberated through trance”.[2]

[1] Benchemsi, Rajae. Farid Belkahia. Skira, 2013, p.36.

[2] Alaoui, Brahim. Farid Belkahia ou l’art en liberté. Skira, 2018, p.98.