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 thus became a leitmotif of the fundamental abstract dimension that his sources yield. By plunging into this experimental route, away from any preconceived affiliations, Belkahia indicates that his choice of copper

“was initially an act of resistance to Morocco’s colonial experience…Matter and its related techniques necessarily determine a particular direction. In doing so, I ensconce my work in a traditional practice that I question to reveal its relationship to modernity”.[1]

In shaping this malleable yet rebellious matter, he engages in a dialogue of dualities and binaries that lie at the heart of a visceral universality; tradition and crafts, modernity and abstraction, fluidity and solidity, balance and chaos, etc. In this piece Le Baiser (The Kiss), the intimate communion between the material and the artist appeases and destabilizes the violent and chaotic facet that is concomitant with this matter. Attuned to its ambivalence, Belkahia consciously transmutes copper into a vehicle for sensuality, thereby bridging a new visual dimension for Moroccan local crafts. Hammered and moulded, through the artist’s physical yet mystical intervention, its identity—an almost terra incognita of sorts— is subjected to an alchemy of processes that renders tangible its tangled possibilities and compositions. Reminiscent of his other sculptural copper pieces Lévres (1966) and Sensuelle (1968), this piece evokes a gestural tactility through a reimagined, stretched form that folds molten desire.

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