- Farid Belkahia , Moroccan B. 1934 Oeil Nocturne (Nocturnal Eye) Dye And Henna On Parchment Laid Down On Board
Note : tifinagh As early as 1962, Belkahia sought to create this new iconography inspired by Moroccan tradition. In 1965, he abandoned canvas and oil paint, turning to natural pigments and organic surfaces. His colours were thereafter sourced from mineral and plant origin, featuring henna, saffron, cobalt, and pomegranate skin. Belkahia also worked with copper, which he folded, cut and nailed to wood, often using circular forms that annul the classic rectangular frame. After copper came animal skin, described by Leroi-Gourhan as a supple solid. Belkahia uses vellum that is washed, scraped, and dried before it can be used. In Oeil Nocturne the melancholy characters of Belkahia's 'expressionist period' of the 1950s have disappeared. Replaced by the triangle, circle, digit, foetal forms, and arrow motifs inspired by the works of Paul Klee. Farid Belkahia tangles up these forms so they appear animated, almost in movement. The forms are lengthened and stretched, sometimes disappearing far over the limits of the frame. The journey the artist offers us is beyond the visible world, it is a journey into the memory of humanity. Oeil Nocturne, painted on skin, is significant of this evolution: in it can be found a number of Belkahia's iconic symbols and motifs. Solar forms, the circle with several circumferences, protective forms, the eye in the centre, and sensual forms, the two mountains that couple with the sky, resembling breasts. The timeless theme of fecundity and cosmic unity are dear to the artist and occupy the whole of his work, a work that occupies a liminal stage, hovering between heaven and earth. Memory has always been the starting point in my art work, says Belkahia, Memory is invisible. It is an abstraction where the past and future collide in a present which belongs to eternity. It is this invisible memory, sombre and ancient, and whose fragments continue to live in the spirit of artists as Paul Klee called it, which lines in Belkahia's work. With the work on vellum that Belkahia has initiated in 1974, there is a metaphysical quest whose route follows the ambivalence of beings and things. If the skin recalls the sacrifice of the animal, the colours and motifs traced by the henna awaken the memory of joyful ceremonies, the wedding and the circumcision. Man and beast are captured in the coloured skin, united in a single vital energy. If henna in its ephemeral form is synonymous with joy and beauty for women, in its permanent form (the tattoo) it is a synonym of the tribal brand, the hold of the masculine over the feminine. And if the green of the henna powder recalls the colour of paradise and of pardon, the red that the henna produces once in contact with the skin, is the colour of fire and of chaos. Moreover, if henna is profane, smagh, another natural colorant that Belkahia employs in his work, is used for inscribing on the wooden tablets the sacred writing of the Koran. Vellum was one of the first materials to have been used since prehistoric times, it is also the material of parchment, used for preserving the memories of the greatest civilisations, and was used to record some of the earliest copies of the Qu'ran. The skin is the most vital part of the body, it has sensual memory. Of touch, of temperature, it can be branded and scalded. It remembers pleasure, pain, heat and cold. It is this essence that Belkahia chooses to convey in his use of vellum. Implanting memory and mysticism through his alternative canvas. For a further example of Farid Belkahia's work, please see lot 252 in this sale.
