Nja Mahdaoui: Jafr - The Alchemy of Signs, (Milan: Skira, 2015), pp. 95-105.
Form and writing are the twin poles between which the art of Nja Mahdaoui has developed for over forty years in Tunisia and Italy. After some early work in Tunis, where he attended the initial courses in painting and art history at the École Libre de Carthage, the artist continued his studies in Rome, graduating from the Accademia di Sant’Andrea in 1967 under the guidance of Zoe Elena Giotta Frunza, a Rumanian pupil of Brancusi, and showed work in a number of group and solo exhibitions at galleries such as El Harka in Palermo, Chez Maxim’s in Rome and above all Fiamma Vigo’s prestigious Galleria Numero in Rome, Florence and Milan (1967). The young artist gave free rein to his insatiable curiosity in this period and experimented with everything – from anthropomorphic figuration, sculpture in wood and oil painting on canvas to collage, photomontage and mixed media.
Mahdaoui then continued his training at the École du Louvre and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, for many decades the city of choice for the young artists and intellectuals of the Arab world. There he consolidated his highly dialectical relationship with some of Europe’s most dynamic avant-garde movements and centres of experimentation.
All these ties perhaps justify the attempt I shall make here to trace the web of relations between Western and Eastern elements that inspired and partly helped to define Mahdaoui’s extraordinary work, which is only apparently circumscribed to the sphere of classical Muslim calligraphy. While he has unquestionably taken this as his horizon of reference all through his life, he has also carved out such a deep and singular niche as to detach himself from it in actual fact. In my view it would be highly reductive to see his work solely within the context of calligraphy or indeed of modern and contemporary Arab art. As I hope to show here, it is also a synthesis of different cultures, including not only the European but also the ideogram-based Japanese and Chinese cultures. Both decorative and performative, it deserves to be known far better outside the Arab world and institutions in Europe and the global system of art because it also belongs to Europe and the world as a whole.
Attention should be drawn first of all to the type of language that Nja Mahdaoui adopted some time after his public debut and the most eclectically and haphazardly experimental phase. In the 1970s, while continuing to experiment but choosing not to show the results to the public, he took up painting in the Concrétion series of abstract, Art Informel works characterized by vigorous gestuality, dense, bloated physicality and dramatic colour reminiscent of Delacroix. Like stormy seas or volcanoes of a primitive biosphere, raging, exuberant and charged with primordial energy, they preserve traces of landscape, a landscape that is cosmic and astral, apparently immersed in the unquiet atmosphere of a world still being formed. It is no coincidence that this should reflect the artist’s own world in that period.
Attention should also be drawn to the dynamism of gesture and the intense drive for experimentation expressed for example in the use of emulsions and vibrations of colour. This is something Mahdaoui shared with a significant part of the European Art Informel movement of “gesture” and “matter”, in particular with the artists most attuned and responsive to the broad range of technical and formal experimentation that drew ultimately on the culture of Surrealism, from Wols to Mathieu, from Toti Scialoja to Gianni Dova.
It is perhaps also worth recalling that when Mahdaoui started out, a rich variety of abstract-Informel work had already been widely circulated and assimilated by young Arab artists such as Ramses Younan and Salah Taher in Egypt, Jilai Gharbaoui in Morocco and Antonio Corpora in Tunisia and then Italy. Moreover, many Arab artists of the period were seeking to achieve a synthesis between the Art Informel, or broadly abstract art of the West and the traditional abstract decoration of the Arab and Muslim world, which they frequently combined with figurative elements or memories in works that were often and understandably somewhat hybrid.
There was nothing of the kind in Mahdaoui’s all-encompassing and almost voracious explorations. Matter and colour were welded together by univocal, impulsive and even violent motion that gave rise to coherent, unified images, at least until another need appeared on his horizons: to deepen his (never interrupted) contact with the practice of Arab calligraphy or – in European art-critical terms – to embed sign in a dimension of gesture and matter, of chromatic substance.
Among other things, it should be recalled that sign had of course been addressed also in Europe since the 1950s so broadly as to characterize specifically the work of groups such as Forma in Rome (with Carla Accardi and Antonio Sanfilippo) and Origine (with Giuseppe Capogrossi) as well as the Milanese artists, including Lucio Fontana, Agostino Bonalumi, Dadamaino and Agostino Ferrari, who saw that Art Informel had become vague and facile and looked to sign for a way out and an antidote.
In rediscovering sign, unlike his European colleagues, Mahdaoui unquestionably drew upon the flow of formal and aesthetic experiences, traditions and skills that has always fuelled and animated the relationship between Arab culture and the image.
Developed and perfected in order to make worthy copies of the Quran as from the first centuries of the Islam, Islamic calligraphy – evocatively described by Hans Belting as “the body of the divine word” – spread throughout the world of the Umayyad Caliphate and was transformed into an extraordinary form of art, considered the purest because it developed entirely within the cultural borders of Islam sheltered from foreign influences.
As early as the eleventh century, with the Abbasid dynasty, the early Kufic script was joined by the six styles (al-aqlam al-sitta) brought to perfection by the legendary vizier of the caliphs of Baghdad Ibn Muqla, and the practice of calligraphy extended from books to the decoration of accessories and objects of glass, marble, ceramics and metal as well as inlaid wood and precious stones. The result was a taste for ornamentation and what I would call a delight in imprinting a whole range of different materials with the sign, this giving rise to an authentic civilization of images, signs and ornamentation aptly described by Jurgis Baltrušaitis as “the Arab genius of decoration”.
The Abbasid dynasty also saw the development of the arabesque, a decorative element initially derived from the ancient motif of the vine but so developed in abstract shapes, lines and curves as to conceal the original point of reference and become an open module, a set of soft and infinitely repeatable signs. “Geometry became a symbolic form in the Arab culture just like the perspective image [in the West] at the beginning of the modern era. It does not represent the world through reproduction and is a symbolic form in that elevates mathematics to the status of cosmic law. Mathematics enjoyed immense popularity at the court in Baghdad.”
The calligraphy of the Maghreb began to differ in the early centuries of the Middle Ages, evolving into a particular type of elegant, elongated script called Maghribi, which in turn soon gave rise to variants such as the rhythmic Qayrawani, from the city of Qayrawan in present-day Tunisia.
These minimal references (to which we should add at least a brief mention of the fact that many excellent Arab artists continued using calligraphy all the way through the twentieth century, including Niazi Mawlawi Baghdadi, Etel Adnan and Mohammed Taha Hossein) are already sufficient, however, to an understanding of the depth and solidity of the cultural and technical heritage upon which Mahdaoui could draw. It was in the 1960s that the artist, moving constantly between Tunisia, France and Italy, began to practice what I shall refer to here as “written painting”, albeit only in experimental, tentative terms and parallel to the abstract art that he continued to produce separately for a number of years.
Once again, however, this was not for Mahdaoui a question of returning to tradition or the origins in whatever sense they may be understood, but rather the best way to reconcile different parts of himself and identify his own path. And his mentor was again a Westerner, an exceptional figure by virtue of his interests and involvement in a whole range of extraordinarily diversified fronts, namely Michel Tapié, who was dividing his time between Paris and Turin in that period.
Having ended his involvement with Art Informel and now focusing in particular on modularity, seriality and the ars combinatoria as the possible matrices of image and of form in general, Tapié stimulated and promoted the work of very diverse artists ranging from the Japanese Gutai Group to the former Concrete artist Angelo Bozzola. He welcomed Nja Mahdaoui into the International Center for Aesthetic Research in Turin, brought him into contact with rich and varied spheres of work and offered him access to a synthesis combining his love and need for free pictorial gesture with the rigour of calligraphy.
So it was that calligraphy became sign and gesture, gradually took over from space and colour and overflowed like a river in full spate on various supports, drawing upon the ancient Islamic practice of writing on everything from ornaments to architecture. Calligraphy entered into a symbiotic relation with painting, was emptied of its original meaning to become the vehicle and support of a powerful artistic personality endowed with great originality, deep culture and vast creative intelligence that was taking shape in the 1970s.
It is particularly important to note that the intelligence of space and composition then came to meld with impulse, spontaneity and freedom of gesture in Mahdaoui’s work. One dimension cannot exist without the other, and it is quite understandable that the search for the right balance or harmony between the two components took a certain amount of time and a certain investment of thought, freedom and energy. Once the right way had been identified, however, the artist began to move freely, working initially and by preference on parchment but soon also on paper and fabrics and in designs for hangings. No surface is too vast for him. His field of action is by definition what is referred to in Anglo-Saxon art as “allover”. It may have a centre but can brook no frame because, like the Abbasid arabesque, it encloses within itself the potentiality of boundless expansion.
In very different but equally comprehensive and involving terms, it is interesting to note that allover painting was practiced a couple of decades earlier by Jackson Pollock in a way that is not too dissimilar, mutatis mutandis. Pollock had of course no tradition to draw upon and the only dimension from which he sought liberation was that of the figure and the image, which he did by liberating gesture and colour not only through his famous dripping technique but also through a sort of dance, a series of harmonious, rhythmic movements that involved all of his body, as clearly shown in Hans Namuth’s film and photographs.
Something similar is true of Mahdaoui. Broad or instead precise and minute, as sharp as the point of a sabre or as soft as a lover’s caress, as agitated and unforeseeable as the rippling feathers of a peacock’s tail, his gesture is to be understood as the continuation of the artist’s hand and arm, the free expansion and contraction of his body in space, an impetus whereby his entire being is bound to and detached from the surface, as concerted and harmonious respiration. The sign is therefore the outcome or trace of this simultaneously physical and mental embrace.
For Mahdaoui too, acting on the surface is part of a dance, something that includes a total temporal dimension, a hic et nunc made up of total presence. There is neither a before, understood as preparation of the work, nor an after, understood as reworking. The works cannot be previously envisaged and cannot be corrected. They are the fruit of a full and exclusive, rational and emotional, sensual and aesthetic relationship. Once this is understood, it proves easy to situate the performances and choreographies to which the artist has devoted so much energy and passion since 1980. Dance, action and performance are all components of an art of which the work is the outcome. They can be described as living calligraphy in which the moving body plays the leading role. Space and action thus become two ways to interpret the same thing, two faces of the same coin, just as particles and electrical charges are two ways of describing the same phenomenon in physics, two different views of the same thing.
Like Pollock’s, Mahdaoui’s space is not an a priori ground of movement but a manifestation thereof, and it is in this that the similarity lies between these two great artists, who naturally remain very different in the specific quality of their gesture, the former free and so intolerant of any grammar as to verge upon the undifferentiated, and the latter educated, controlled and fully aware of relations, measures, scales and colours.
It is no coincidence that the works of both are characterized by a certain apparent horror vacui, and the reason is the same for both. If space is a function of movement and the solid trace of this movement, the void simply does not exist; it is non-action, undifferentiated, amorphous darkness beyond the galaxies. It was not until later that Mahdaoui appears to have contemplated the void in properly rhythmic and melodic terms as the context of relation between signs. By this I mean to say that the void takes on the same value in Mahdaoui’s compositions as the pause in music; it is a tempo between the notes.
There is, however, still another very important and indeed crucial point to be made with respect to Mahdaoui’s work on its way towards attaining the fullness of an original and unique style. It must be stated, as indeed all his critics have, that his calligraphy is absolutely non-significant in the sense that it is in no way subservient to the text, the word and meaning itself.
The artist does not write but caresses writing with sign-gestures that take up the features of Arabic calligraphy without bending to the requirements of the Arabic language, that are pure decoration, pure ornamentation, and as such akin to the work carried out on sign completed in the same decades by Italian artists like Antonio Sanfilippo and above all Agostino Ferrari. In their case too, sign is born out of abstraction and succeeds in approaching communication, significant writing, but without ever reaching it. And it is important that figures radically different in culture, taste and ancestry should have developed such similar or indeed concordant intentions without ever coming into contact or agreement.
There were evidently certain ideas in the air, corresponding to the needs of the time as regards the aesthetic renewal of the visual arts on the one hand and on the other the attempt to maintain a living bond with tradition, to be understood as the tradition of painting in the case of the above-mentioned Italian artists and of Arabic calligraphy in the case of Mahdaoui.
The attempt proved wholly successful. Mahdaoui has had countless opportunities since the 1980s to manifest his increasingly coordinated and increasingly complex decorative approach, the drive for beauty practiced on all manner of things and through all manner of movements, starting to create performances as early as 1987 and even to found the Ikaa or Body Writing modern dance company.
Meanwhile, the series of works that took shape tirelessly one after the other – Mahdaoui is a most prolific and indeed irrepressible artist as well as a person who generates enthusiasm and involvement – include papyrus, paper, canvas and parchment, graphics, illustrations, patterns for clothes and fabrics, jewellery, bronzes, drums, stained glass windows, aeroplanes, buildings, monuments, objects and projects on the urban scale. His artistic language also displays extraordinary adaptability to the three dimensions and ease in breaking free of the surface and embarking on the conquest of three-dimensional space, which appears to have involved no effort whatsoever but rather to have taken place as a wholly natural and spontaneous evolution of his work. This is indeed so, and it is so because Mahdaoui was not born in Western painting – with its characteristic focus on the surface – but in the total space of Eastern and Western decoration, which is not a space of representation defined, fixed and crystallized in the image but a versatile, mobile, dynamic space that proves particularly well-suited to him, a space that becomes lived and living through the artist’s action.
The centre or linchpin remains the body, and the space is its entire radius of action, which can expand towards the grandeur of the urban scale, literally flying on the wings of thought and vision, or contract to the smallness of a miniature without losing any of its meaningfulness, intensity, concentration and balance. As the alchemists and hermetic philosophers said, macrocosm and microcosm coexist here as two equally possible and equally accessible spheres, as their centre of gravity is and remains the living and active body of the artist, endowed both with the millimetric perfectionism of the creator of illumined manuscripts and with the vision of a landscape painter. It is no coincidence that Mahdaoui has often referred to the dialectics between these two dimensions, albeit posing other questions: “What sign, letter or colour could ever lead us to the mystery of the infinitely large and the infinitely small? … Is meaning accessible to man? Is it visible, invisible or hidden behind this unclosed square, this open circle, this scarlet line, figures that pierce the darkness of ignorance?”
Woven into these reflections is also a reference to colour, the most important element in Mahdaoui’s work, unlike what takes place in that of many other European artists working on sign. This may stem to some degree from his sophisticated taste for rich, elaborate ornamentation and his intellectual grasp of the universe as an infinite manifestation of beauty and the senses as the best tools to perceive and delight in it. The eye is filled with colour, all the colours of the rainbow, and abandoning it would be nonsense and indeed immoral for an artist, for anyone born a painter.
Thus it is that from one series to another and one work to the next gold is combined with lacquer red and the deepest, most transparent ultramarine, or with the silver of a buoyant, elastic script. And then we have green, black and yellow, enamelled, iridescent hues that accompany, attune and court the agile course of the non-significant sign like a celestial reflection or glow. The eye delights immensely in Mahdaoui’s work because it is instinct with all the nuances and vibrations of the natural colours, contained, harmonized and educated, so to speak, by the loft culture of which the sign is the expression.
In conclusion, I would like to note that regardless of their size and support, which is often mentioned in order to facilitate the identification of the series, Mahdaoui has always called his works graphemes or calligrams, words used in the terminology of linguistics to indicate respectively the “smallest graphic unit of an alphabetical or syllabic or ideographic system, a sign that is distinguished from all the others in a set graphic system” and “a poetic composition characterized by an arrangement of the words in such a way as to form patterns, decorations or bizarre figures”.
While the first definition is hardly surprising, the second is. It is indeed interesting, and certainly not fortuitous, that the denomination of all of Mahdaoui’s apparently Eastern works should already contain a deeply Western reference to Apollinaire, who invented the word in 1918 as the title of a collection of concrete poems (Calligrammes) in which the words form figures and images that are significant in their own right, such as the celebrated poem in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.
What counts above all, however, is not this but the fact that Mahdaoui evidently regards his work as poetic despite the total absence of words: work that captures the eye and the mind and causes them to fall in love with the rhythm and the visual richness of the dance of signs that unfolds before them; work that always thwarts every stubborn attempt at reading – at holding fast to the limits of a text, however lofty it may be – and instead stimulates the mind to soar further and higher towards the non-signifying harmony of the coloured spheres. Towards the boundless, musical silence of beauty.