Mehdi Moutashar at the Cluny Abbey's Farinier

For more than fifty years, the artist has been developing a body of work at the confluence of  two artistic heritages: Geometric abstraction and the Islamic aesthetic tradition.  Between the arts of Islam and Western arts, his works are guided by the geometric framework inspired by calligraphy, textiles and architecture. Using a deliberately restricted vocabulary of forms, Moutashar's work unfolds according to purely logical procedures, like a series of doors opening indefinitely on each other.

He plays on the grammar of this square and the transparencies of materials, the repetition of which reflects the general composition of the building. In the same way, the very extensive scale of the ingredients that the artist uses, refers to the idea of ​​a space that nothing stops and tends towards infinity. He uses metal, wire and pigment as a game of deconstruction of the square, of folding, of reappropriation of space. The always different angles of view that accompany the wandering of the visitor are reliefs that both dig into the ground and detach the work from it.