Nja Mahdaoui (Tunisian, B.1937)
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Literature : Charles Pocock (ed.), NJA MAHDAOUI, Dubai, 2007, illustrated in colour twice
Notes : In Jorf 4 Nja Mahdaoui combines his signature abstracted calligraphic style with its various regimented and sweeping forms, with emphatic rectangular and triangular shapes. Mahdaouis use of gold and silver paint, a key feature in both his Jorf and his Parchment series, recalls traditional Islamic illuminated manuscripts.Mahdaoui is from a generation of Arab artists who studied abroad but sought inspiration from their native culture. Experimentation with the formal qualities of Arabic script and calligraphy as a means of developing a local style began in the 1950s a trend popularly known as Hurufiyah gaining momentum in the 1960s. It was not until the early 1970s, however, that Mahdaoui began to explore the aesthetic possibilities offered by the Arabic letter, having exhibited with Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, one of the pioneers of Saqqakhaneh art in Iran and a resident of Paris since the 1960s. Since then Mahdaoui has focused on the abstraction of calligraphic letters and shapes, creating a distinctive style and approach to this form of art.Nja Mahdaoui's work is based on the shapes associated with the various cursive and Kufic Arabic scripts, but he is more interested in movement, the rhythms and the visual effects of the act of writing and the expressive potential of the morphology of letters, than the content itself. The calligrams which appear in his work might utilise the rhythmic and formal appearance of Arabic script, but in fact they are not legible, but are simply abstract forms based on the visual structure of calligraphy. Mahdaoui prefers to use fragments of Arabic letters to formulate his compositions, and deconstructs the letterword in order to encourage the viewer to decode-imagine-read the content of the work according to the formal relationships of signs as abstract script.
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