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Mohamed Melehi is regarded as a major figure for postcolonial Moroccan art and of modernism in the Global South. Professor of painting, sculpture and photography at the Casablanca School of Fine Arts from 1964 to 1969, Melehi contributed to the cultural scene of Post-Independence Morocco on a grand scale: from public murals, to teaching, to publishing, to architecture. Melehi’s work forms a dialogue between Moroccan-Berber traditional and popular craft and, through his time in New York early in his career, the Hard Edge painters of the 1960s.
Through his Moucharabieh series, Mohamed Melehi maintains a link with his 1960s works through the visual pattern of the wave. Melehi’s study of pre-Islamic art led him to identify the wave pattern as a structural unit or fundamental signifier in most of Afro-Arab visual cultures – from the Berber to the Mesopotamian but also Andalusian. His recent work encapsulates multiple, almost infinite, variations on a motif that suggests movement, uidity and sensuality; but also cosmological relations, playing out between the sun, the sea, the clouds, and the horizon.
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Installation view of Melehi's exhibition Arabian Moucharabieh, 2020 at Cromwell Place, London -
The Moucharabieh series opens new possibilities and unconscious landscapes for envisioning the visual and psychological dynamics of the waves, at times close to optical hallucinations. Bursting out of the frame, with their plain surfaces, Melehi’s recently-painted waves retain a memory of Hard Edge formalism, whilst also creating visual margins, breaches and paradoxi- cal symmetries. Reminiscent of mashrabiya pierced window grilles, a typical feature of classic Islamic architecture, these new works with their waves and vivid chromatic sequences seek to reenact these old light- ltering devices.
Conversely, these Moucharabieh waves also recall a very a different architectural experience, the twists, convolutions, enfoldments and overwhelming optical distortions of the Baroque. Melehi’s attitude is driven by spirituality and rarely by materiality. He has always considered that the power of art lies in the conceptual eld and act of imagination, in the capacity to generate beliefs and ideas; not in the sheer visual or aesthetic concern.
Refections on Mohamed Melehi’s Moucharabieh Series, Morad Montazami, Paris, September 2020
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Melehi in the studio, 2017, Photo by H. Chergui
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'Hard-edge painting made me rediscover the abstraction inherent in Islamic art. Morrocan art was always hard edge. My question was, what could we find in Morocco that was an expression of modernism?' Mohamed Melehi
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Above: Installation view of Melehi's exhibition Arabian Moucharabieh, 2020 at Cromwell Place, London
In 1984, a retrospective of Mohamed Melehi at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (NYC) was presented as presumably the first large-scale solo exhibition in the US of an artist from Northern Africa. A landmark in Melehi’s artistic trajectory, that exhibition gave him the occasion to reconnect with the American art scene, which he had experienced so vividly between 1962 and 1964. In the attempt to highlight the importance of this event, the Bronx Museum of the Arts commissioned a documentary film about Melehi to the American video artist Shalom Gorewitz. The filmmaker and the painter return together to Melehi’s most remarkable site-specific and “integrated artworks”; as well as to the traditional mosques of the High Atlas, where Melehi documented outstanding decorative paintings and unexpected vernacular modernism.
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Exhibition poster, Melehi. Recent Paintings, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1984-1985, Design by Mohamed Melehi, Courtesy Toni Maraini archives
Painted ceiling, High-Atlas, 1968, Photo by Mohamed Melehi, Courtesy Safieddine-Melehi archives
Fibula (Berber jewel), published in Maghreb Art n°1, 1965, Photo by Mohamed Melehi, Courtesy Toni Maraini archives
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Above: Melehi works from the 1980s including a Berber carpet (from the private collection of Bert Flint) next to his soft and angular paintings | Installation view of New Waves: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School Archives, 2020 presented by Alserkal Arts Foundation, Courtesy Concrete, Alserkal Avenue, Photo by Musthafa Aboobacker
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Above: Melehi works from the 1960s including his painting Sleeping Manhattan, 1963 (second from left) | Installation view of New Waves: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School Archives, 2020, presented by Alserkal Arts Foundation, Courtesy Concrete, Alserkal Avenue, Photo by Musthafa Aboobacker
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Mohamed Melehi
Arabian Moucharabieh Exhibition at Cromwell Place, London October 15, 2020
