$100,000

Artwork Description

| About the work 'The desert prompted him to embrace symbolic chromatic options and arid tones, subjecting his vocabulary to a stringent formal cleansing. New colors appeared: ochres, browns and carmine provided the matrix silt from which scenes arise. In a work from this period (Fig.1, Untitled), we see a single, chalk-white figure grappling with a desert - the makings of a modern tragedy. Is it the defeat of bodies surrendered to the dereliction of the world, to the dead sands of their inner selves? A march towards a presumed freedom - which we don’t see in the painting? These sketched and unevenly colored quasi-figures do more than just express the artist’s avoidance of frontal figuration. In our view, they also testify to an ethical stance shared by certain artists of his era: the figurability of the human body, whose moral status has been obscured by conflict, exile and forced displacement. In certain works (Fig. 2, Untitled), the overflowing pigments, the thickly-colored material’s accidents on the substrate introduce an impression of progressive burial of bodies in a night laden with red splashes; a metaphor for the blood spilled in large spurts by ruthless wars, for the gaping wounds of a world overburdened by conquests, or for the nameless, faceless people crushed by authoritarianism. In the first composition, by contrast, the desert holds sway. Gradual, pervasive. Humans, belongings and language are engulfed, together with their symbols and material culture. A metonymic desert, acting as a deteriorating substance, an instrument of time and oblivion. A few geometric elements detached from past notions inhabit a portion of a large rectangle. Signs, but what do they tell us in “this cultural desert where signs and symbols waver ”? Beyond the rectangle, a darker background sets up a two way dialogue between red and orange ochres, white and, above all, a striking blue that has made Kacimi’s work so distinctive: a nila (indigo) blue, halfway between cobalt and ultramarine; a blue that is “the body of mystery, [...] the energy of dreams”.' Excerpt 'Mohammed Kacimi, 'Time as absolute unity' by Reda Zaireg, exhibition catalogue 'Mohammed Kacimi: 1993-2004, une oeuvre universelle', Comptoir des Mines Galerie (2024) | About the artist Born in Meknes, Mohammed Kacimi (1942 – 2003) was one of the most important artists of post-second World War Morocco. Highly influenced by the sea, the desert and his origins? He transformed Moroccan Art into something entirely new. After having followed, at the beginning of the 1970’s, the path of western painting and abstraction, he turned to the African continent as the source for his originality and the guarantee of a new, personal expression without constraints. Painting, sculpture, performance, theatre, dance, music, in situ installation, kacimi put his hand to every art from throughout his career. These different “phases”, starting with the Marches and the search for an original abstraction, followed by the Oceanides, Traversées and the Shéhérazade series, up to the temps des conteurs and other African experiences, each constituted an original adventure. An artist of transition, his journeys between his country, the Maghrebn the Mashriq, Europe and Africa, as well as his shifts from discipline to another, rapidly earned him international fame. A painter of colour, a champion of blue and ochre, tempted by black, Mohammed Kacimi fits within the history of art as an interpreter of existence and of our human condition. In his works, he searched for the reconciliation between a tragic vision of his time and his yearning for happiness. Nadine Descendre. Biography excerpted from the monograph Mohammed Kacimi by Nadine Descendre, SKIRA Editions, 2019. Public collections | Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rabat • Mathaf Museum, Doha, Qatar • Dr. Ramzi Dalloul Collection, Beirut • Bank Al-Maghrib Museum, Rabat • ONA Foundation, Casablanca • Société Générale Marocaine de Banques, Casablanca • Municipal Fund for Contemporary Art of the City of Paris • Arab World Institute, Paris • Contemporary Art Museum of Val-de-Marne • Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. • Barjeel Foundation, Sharjah