Farid Belkahia

Moroccan artist Farid Belkahia was born in Marrakesh in 1934. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris from 1954 to 1959 then went to Prague where he studied scenography at the Theatre Academy until his return to Morocco in 1962. Upon his return, he was appointed the director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca, and remained there until 1974. He lived and worked in Morocco his entire life.

While studying in Paris, Belkahia became interested in works by artists Paul Klee and Georges Rouault. These artists, teetering between expressionism, surrealism, primitivism, and abstract styles, left a strong impression on Belkahia’s work.

The artist was in contact with French poets like Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. At this stage, Belkahia’s works were extremely political, they carried a blame on wars and human sufferings and bridged the Arab, the African and the European culture. But soon the artist broke-up from the occidental painting tradition, undertaking a postcolonial position that departed from a political point of view in the aftermath of Moroccan independence, and reached a belief that contemporary art is generated from a cultural time and not a geographical sphere.

The artist strayed away from oil painting and easels. As director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca, Belkahia pushed the school towards Moroccan visual culture, technics, and aesthetics rather than the standard occidental model of painting, offering to his students a wider view admitting that arts belonged to all cultures. He developed an independent artistic style, using paper, copper and later leather as only supports and natural materials and pigments as only mediums.

Belkahia worked for eight years on large-scale copper, exploring the restrained paths of this material, at the time hard, resistant, malleable and flexible, creating abstract bas-reliefs, which forms were free from any reference to the habit of Westerns to delimit and frame their work. In the mid-70’s, he shifted his medium, becoming most known for his work on leather. Here, the artist having neither experimental nor aesthetic concerns, used the leather as a support that contains the trace of what has been, that carries remembrance and history.

Using traditional techniques, Belkahia stretched the leather over shaped supports and dyed the skin with natural colorants such as henna, grenade, and saffron. Like an alchemist, working with materials, odors, and flavors, Belkahia intermingled earthy and natural colors with signs and symbols.

In 1969 Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi and Mohamad Chebaa and other teachers organized an art street exhibition “Exposition Manifeste” in the market square of Jemaa El –Fnaa in Marrakesh, an open-air exhibition that promoted art outside conventional art spaces.

Following his desire to explore and his intuition, Belkahia essentially indulged in motifs and shapes that are reminiscent of a cultural heritage. The artist realized that the Maghreb signs and symbols were part of the vast forming network of African, Occidental, and Oriental culture, and therefore he explored these highly representative and significant constant forms, in an obstinacy to analyze the world and discover its origins.

Through his work, he adapted these ancestral patrimonial memories and cultivated them into a unique and modern rendition. Therefore, the style that he created was a way of manifesting an international modernism burgeoning from a local context.

His recurrent use of symbolic figures and shapes, such as triangles, dots, squares, arrows, and hands, was a quest to reach universality. Along with these symbols, he often utilized the Tifinagh and Amazigh alphabets, incorporating them in his own stylistic vision, creating for himself a whole new vocabulary.

Belkahia passed away in Marrakech in 2014.

Written by L’Or Iman Puymartin © Dalloul Art Foundation