Farid Belkahia (Morocco, Born 1934) Jerusalem, Diameter 70 Cm. (27 9/16)
Note : As an artist Belkahia’s artwork features a captivating minimalism of symbolic and iconographic forms. His work is based on an obsession with memory as the molder of modernity. He developed a new visual vocabulary grounded on Morocco’s indigenous culture, using traditional materials such as copper, leather and animal skin, along with natural dyes such as henna, sumac and saffron rather than oils and acrylics. The leather is stretched into abstract pieces of varying sizes and shapes. The signs and symbols are inspired by Berber tattoos and the Tifinagh-Tuareg and Berber alphabets. Arabic numbers, letters, circles, arrows, and triangular forms are reoccurring symbols in his work. Belkahia’s painted works are better described as wall installations, pieced together as a puzzle, with each shaping fitting into one another.
