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. 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 and Islamic handcrafts. After a fruitful journey of working with copper, he turned his focus towards a rather exacting material, animal skin, which simultaneously pays homage to parchment and traditional mediums in Islamic arts.[1]

By signifying skin as a physical surface for artmaking, Belkahia renders bodily boundaries as malleable as copper for instance, resistant, albeit far more permeable. Notwithstanding the threat of a permanent stench of putrefaction, skin, a receptacle of memory, undergoes a process of sublimation, an ennoblement, a metamorphosis that resuscitate its symbolic and aesthetic traces. In Blue Landscape, Belkahia employs a natural pigment, henna, on tautened skin to illustrate a landscape of varying mountains, resembling breasts, and thus authenticating its French title Deux Seins (Two Breasts). Indeed, between 1996 and 1999, he produced a series as an investigation of the Malhun, a form of poetic expression that eulogizes feminine attributes, in which he favoured the use of the circle.[2] According to Belkahia’s dialectic, whilst women were symbolized by circular forms, Man was represented by triangles.[3]

Traversed by an arrow on the far-right foreground, the geometrisation of the scene appears in motion, almost animated, as the artist does not relinquish his interest in primordial and universal sings and symbols. Solar forms reminiscent of his piece Les deux infinis (1987), rectangles demarcated by his pigment, and dots in plenitude. The sum of this equation resounds with Belkahia’s perpetual exploration of profound abstract and spiritual themes of fecundity, unity and the cosmos, where he navigates between the masculine and the feminine, the esoteric and the erotic.

[1] Benchemsi, Rajae. Farid Belkahia. Skira, 2013, p.56.

[2] Benchemsi, Rajae. Farid Belkahia. Skira, 2013, p.82.

[3] Ibid., p.96.