Translated from French by Janet Fouli.
Nja Mahdaoui, exhibition catalogue, Meem Gallery, 2007.
The Emancipation of the Pen-stroke
An aesthetics of deconstruction
The art of Nja Mahdaoui is a challenge to the ornamental type of calligraphic tradition, inscribed in well-established codes. The artist has invented original modes of procedure that have given an aesthetic configuration to the Arabic script within the modern, contemporary pictorial movement. He has done this, not by breaking with the established form of local culture, but by giving new life to the patrimonial signs by regenerating them, and by integrating other forms and procedures borrowed from other artistic techniques. They go from large pictorial formats using vertical panels to triptychs and arrangements with variable modules.
This of course presupposes a permeability of the creative act that rewrites in its difference integrity in the reworking of the traditional signs as signs of a pictorial or sculptural presence, operated by a singular procedure.
By varying forms and materials, Nja Mahdaoui bears witness to the wealth and diversity of artistic expression in a cultural context that maintains, at the same time, commitment to an Arab tradition, yet with a horizon of multiple futurition. He knows better than anyone that the graphic art of Arabic lettering is an extremely rich element, by dint of the variety of its styles and codifications, be it in manuscript calligraphy or in architectural ornamentation. Moreover, this element can effect a double seduction, that of its origins in the time-honoured relationship between language and the divine, and that of the infinite calligraphic wealth and variety of its different ornamental configurations.
In fact, as A. Khatibi reminds us, the art of calligraphy is inscribed, first and foremost, “in the linguistic structure, and it establishes a second code, derived from language but playing on it, duplicating it in a visible ecstasy (…); starting from the place where meaning is unfurled”, he writes, “a simulacrum is unveiled that enchants the tongue, in the literal sense: it transforms it into a divine formula.” 1
However, the works that Nja Mahdaoui presents here allow us to reconsider pictorial art in the light of the calligraphic line seen as a traditional mode taken in its sculptural, and not its illustrative, dimension; he gives an aesthetic charge to the abstract field of visual arts, so as to include it among the movements of present-day international formal revolutions. The introduction of abstraction in painting, by means of calligraphic forms, stimulates creation, reducing the original sacred tenor of the sign, which then becomes formation and generation.
One might think that by choosing calligraphy as a pictorial element, one is caught up in the configuration of signifiers of the language itself, i.e. that in which pictorial language is apprehended by the graphic form of linguistic signs.
Comparing Chinese calligraphic art to the play of free sketches in contemporary art, Claude Lévi-Strauss has already noticed that nothing allows us to identify the letter seen as an elementary form compared with combinations of units that are not elementary forms, whereas calligraphy is based on units that “possess a unique existence in their capacity as signs destined by a system of writing to fulfil other functions.” 2 In this sense, the work of traditional calligraphy is language “because it is the result of the contrapuntal adjustment of two levels of articulation, that is to say, the level of meaning and the aesthetic level of artistic values.”
In the modern, contemporary interpretation that Nja Mahdaoui gives of the shape of the Arabic letter, it is the first level of articulation that is, so to say, suspended, revealing aesthetic properties that cancel meaning whilst leaving its echo to hover over the texture of the graphic form.
In fact the ambiguity of its appearance persists by force of a habit forged by tradition. The artist knows this, he deliberately plays on it in the seduction of a simulation that creates waves of incomplete meanings. The gaze is constantly deprived of its ability to read and is brought back to pure pictorial seeing.
Confident of his experience, he has created new procedures, through which he has managed to introduce a trans-creative energy by this insertion of the Arabic letter into pictorial art. He has freed it of its adherence to the role of both signifier and symbol. This emancipation is amplified by his present practice of working with new formats using original surroundings, and his mixing of purely chromatic free abstract motifs.
It is by exploiting the dynamic potentialities of calligraphy in the exceptional dexterity of his execution and repetition of the sign, that Nja Mahdaoui introduces a kinetic element by the variation of thick or slender strokes, of cursive and oblique signs. Every time he takes the risk of challenging the signifier by playing on forms that approach traditional configurations, in order to subvert them immediately in ways that place them beyond meaning.
He effects transgressions by creating dispositions between clearly marked geometrical figures (squares, circles, lozenges) and flows of tiny writing (close to the Ghobar script that is undecipherable to the naked eye) on chromatic bands that cross, or come up against, the edge of the thick strokes. The spatial distribution of the jointing of planes and intertwinings of the cursive letters is often punctuated by a complete break in the rectilinear movement. Moreover, the dynamics is accentuated by the drawing out of the shape of the “tails” provided by certain letters, which allow the artist to play on the thickness of the line until its curve is infinitely honed down at its extremity.
The interlacing of some lines, that take their scroll and their angularity from various shapes of Arabic lettering, burst in their élan into little black squares reminiscent of punctuation, which is in fact, as it was originally, the mark made by applying the nib of the reed pen (kalamos). The whole forms dynamic, autonomous tri-dimensional figures that cannot be reduced to a calligram although they may suggest its contours. In some figures, the pen-stroke is liberated from the artistic whole to become a violent incision in the body of a work that seems to oscillate, and destabilizes the gaze.
Thus there is a blending of purely formal clusters, but one in which an aesthetics is at work, playing on the presence/absence of sacred signs. There is also, above all, a reflection on the trans-creative power of the calligraphic process that is metamorphosed into a distribution of abstract strokes on an open pictorial space. In the words of Deleuze, it is “a vital force characteristic of the Abstraction that marks out the smooth surface”, the abstract, kinetic stroke that is meant as “the purchase of a smooth surface” 3 , and non-organic.
The interest of Nja Mahdaoui’s work also resides in his exploitation of the plastic effects of the Arabic letter on different backgrounds that break both with the pictorial window and with traditional ornamentation. Sometimes he works with Indian ink on sheepskins that he has shaped by burning them at the edges, renewing in a novel way the link with parchment. He also creates forms by including cursive, oblique and angular shapes in which the panels seem to communicate through difference and repetition. The possibilities that arise out of the richness of his stroke, and the quasi-physical acquisition of calligraphic gestuality lead him to create a mélange with pure forms and coloured planes that intensify the spatial rhythm. The painter brings them together in the movement of a graphic form that may be thick or fluctuating, which may border, cross or divide the whole. This poietic interweaving throws the calligraphic sign and lyric abstraction out of focus.
Nja Mahdaoui has understood that being “of his time” does not entail to be alien to one’s history, to the tokens of the past, or its mythologies, in order to innovate by a radical discontinuity. Being “of one’s time” could mean to inscribe one’s actuality in a trans-creative movement that regenerates meaning in a transgressive manner. The return to a so-called patrimonial element is therefore not only intended to celebrate the past by a symbolic observance or rituals that operate in a nostalgic or founding way. It may, as is the case here, become the mainspring of a cross-figural process. This is due to the permeability of a creative act that is enriched by memory, by the polyvalence of experience, and is open to the futurition of imaginative vision.
1. Abdelkabir Khatibi, L’art calligraphique arabe, ed. Chêne, p. 20 (here translated).
2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit, Mythologique 1, Plon, p. 29 (translated).
3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille plateaux, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1980, p. 623 (translated).