Untitled

In memory of Mohamed Melehi who just recently passed this October 2020, the artist is regarded as a major figure of postcolonial Moroccan art and Global South modernism and a multi-faceted painter, photographer, muralist, graphic and urban designer, art teacher and cultural activist. He was part of the core group of educators of the Casablanca Art School during its most radical period – between 1964 and 1969. Melehi’s early experiments with abstraction in Rome and New York (he took part in the Hard Edge and Geometric Painting exhibition of the MOMA, NYC, 1963) led to the maturation of the wave, his emblematic motif, throughout the 1970s-1980s.

Melehi’s various practices can be reflected in his work from the early 1980s, where notably his relationship to architectural spaces and to mural painting is evident in the present work Untitled, 1982. His signature pattern of the waves invading the lower half of the picture becomes superimposed with the 'abstract landscape' structured by skylines and waxing crescent moons--all aesthetics that are typical of works from this period. Through the shades of blue and vertical stripes that break the rhythm of the waves, the seeming return to some hard edge composition is balanced with Melehi’s passion for popular Amazigh metal jewellery (which can be traced throughout the Sahara desert both in Berber or Touareg traditions). A profound relationship to local art and craft where these combinations of patterns (between straight and wavy lines, abstract and figurative forms, femininity and masculinity symbols) can be easily found and were documented by Melehi through his photography.

In Melehi’s colourfulness and pattern-making process, one can feel the links with decorative or applied arts and design, which he would constantly reinterpret with a sense of functionality or 'integration'. Hence underlining the (first generation) Bauhaus influence for Melehi and the Casablanca Art School artists, who shared the same tendency to regard the avant-garde artist as a new craftsman.

The present work is also reminiscent of the time Melehi was fully involved in the development of mural paintings and urban design in the context of the Asilah Arts Festival (which he co-founded in northern Morocco in 1978); as indeed his works from the 1980s seemed to open a new space for reframing the wave (either through craft objects or architecture). This festival, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, constitutes one of the many platforms created by Melehi and the Casablanca Art School generation, to compensate the lack of visibility for local artists; to contribute to the social project where art meets life; to synthesise painting, landscape, and architecture. The kinetic moonlight of Untitled, 1982 explicitly stands for that of Asilah’s nocturnal atmosphere, as in many of his works from the 1980s.

This work can also be admired for its aesthetics of clear-cut colours and radical geometry, a testimony of Melehi’s collaboration with the Moroccan architects studio Faraoui & De Mazières since the beginning of the 1970s. Creating in situ reliefs, large scale frescoes and furniture design for the hotel lobby, banks, restaurant rooms or garden spaces, Melehi shaped his own approach to 'integrated art' that was both minimalist and grassroots. Even the modular shapes of the hotels around Marrakech designed by Patrice de Mazières are echoed in Untitled, 1982.

In recalling one of Toni Maraini’s descriptions of Melehi’s abstract landscape to grasp their full poetic potential, 'Water, earth, fire, air, assembling and decomposing into sunrays, whirlpools, stars, rainbows, all part of a dramaturgy of natural elements and cosmic forces.' (Maraini, Ecrits sur l’art: choix de textes, Maroc 1967-1989, Al Kallam, 1990)

Mohamed Melehi’s work has featured in numerous solo exhibitions including a retrospective at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 1995, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1984 and recently New Waves: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School Archives, The Mosaic Rooms, London; MACAAL, Marrakech; Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai, 2020. His work is held in international museum collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; L'Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; MOMA, New York, and MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.