$27,000

Artwork Description

| About the work Immediately before our eyes is the image of an artist whose geometrism is far removed from that of his contemporaries. Then we are struck by his creativity, which, despite its roots in an early trend in modern Moroccan art, never ceases to amaze us with its timeliness and originality. The artist is an archaeologist of his own life, digging it up before breathing new life into it. His personal mark is reflected in a Suprematist inspiration that he combines in his own way by transforming shapes (squares, circles, etc.) into pure symbols of a formal interpretation of the world. If we still retain traces of the artist's ‘style’ (or rather styles) here and there, it is essentially because of the urgent emergence, I would say, of this writing, generally in black (on a white background), which denotes a certain inner frugality, a weightedness that blends rigour and freedom. The artist draws his calligraphy from the line, in particular the famous ‘barakat Mohammad’, which can be found in its entirety in his earlier works. It's a free, fragmented calligraphy, reconstituted in measured cadences, deployed in such a way as to create a memory and mirror effect! Pierre Restany said of Melehi: ‘If I had to define the climate of Melehi's minimalist abstract painting, I would say: “the real always escapes upwards”’. Demnati's recent works illustrate this state of transcendence. Their breath is inevitably reminiscent of the Sufi ‘dhikr’ and the initiation trance that goes with it. A spiritual luminosity emanates from the shapes of these letters, between legibility and illegibility, like a confession of their unfathomable depth. | About the artist Born in Tangiers in 1946, Bachir Demnati won a scholarship for excellence and entered La Cambre - the prestigious National School of Visual Arts in Brussels - following his first exhibition organised by the Ibn El Khatib high school alumni association. After graduating in 1969, he took over the reins of the Guy Stenier practice - the largest architectural firm in Tangiers. In 1970, he surprised the public with his avant-garde work on the Casino Municipal de Tanger under the patronage of Her Highness Princess Lalla Fatima Zohra and the regional governor Housni Benslimane. He joined the ‘Casablanca movement’ and began several group and solo exhibition projects with them. In 1972, he was a founding member of AMAP - l'Association Marocaine des Arts Plastiques. In 1975, he brought together Mohamed Chabaa and Mohamed Melehi to exhibit at his art gallery, ‘La Galerie Cotta’, an exhibition which received considerable media coverage and enabled the three artists to gain a wide audience. From 1976 to 1978, he enjoyed great success as an artist and architect. He took part in the first Asilah Festival. In 2016, his work attracted a great deal of attention at an auction organised by CMOOA - Compagnie Marocaine des Objets et Œuvres d'Art, and will be presented in 2018 at the exhibition ‘That feverish leap into the fierceness of life’, organised by Sam Bardaouil and Til Fellrath as part of Art Dubai and devoted to the birth of modernity in the five major creative schools in the Arab world. Bachir Demnati's work will be featured on the cover of the exhibition catalogue.