Nja Mahdaoui: Jafr - The Alchemy of Signs (Milan: Skira, 2015), pp. 11-15.
“I don’t plan it, there are no pre-conceived designs; once I have chosen the format I enter my world immediately.”1 This world that Mahdaoui talks about is an entire vocabulary; deep within it is Arabic calligraphy but not as something to be read. His works have been called “calligrams” and he a “choreographer of letters”. But they change and move too much to be easily defined – as he, the most graceful of men, appears to dance when he works. These “gestures” as he describes them appear on all manner of materials – from his early parchments to tapestry, drums, stained glass, and the fuselage of airplanes. He has worked with dancers and musicians, there have been live performances where he has painted on human bodies, he has created stage sets and worked with fashion designers. Inspired by literature, he makes artist’s books where his paintings echo and compliment the words of the Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi or the tragic story of Shams al-Nahar from the 1001 nights.
Tracing the roots of where this all began, Mahdaoui places great importance on the environment in which he grew up and the role that certain key figures have played upon his work as an artist. At school in Carthage, it was the Pères Blancs, the Catholic Missionaries who opened his eyes to art. Tunisia, under French Mandate until the Revolution of 1956, had a vibrant international art scene; it was famed as providing inspiration to Paul Klee2 who lived in Sidi Bou Said in 1914; there was the École de Tunis founded in 1949 in opposition to the stereotypes of Orientalism and where the artists were united in painting and evoking “local” themes.3 But it was not this direction that Mahdaoui was interested in. His friends were poets, writers and musicians; they shared a communality of spirit, a belief in the future, a different kind of vision. Without any specific training, he began to paint and it was Riccardo Averini, Director of the Dante Alighieri Italian Cultural Centre in Tunis, who introduced him to Western contemporary art in 1961, the year in which he also travelled to Italy for the first time. Encouraged by Dr Averini, he started to exhibit his work in Tunis in 1965, and the following year at Galleria El Harka in Palermo. Again with Averini’s encouragement, Mahdaoui decided to go to Rome to study and took courses at the Accademia di Sant’Andrea between 1965 and 1967. As Martina Corgnati evocatively describes in this book, this was a fascinating moment for Italian contemporary art – the period of the Dada avant-garde – that was to influence him profoundly; Mahdaoui was excited and with an appetite to learn. He enrolled with Zoe Elena Giotta Frunza, a student of the sculptor Brancusi, and spent time in museums and art galleries. His Collages produced during the 1960s and early 1970s with their surrealist Christ figures, Madonnas and doges act, in his words, as “a diary” of this time.
A key exhibition from this period for Mahdaoui was back in Tunis in 1967, at the Galerie Yahia. In addition to Nja there were Néjib Belkhodja, Juliette Garmadi, Fabio Roccheggiani and Naceur Ben Cheikh. The introduction to the exhibition booklet written by Mohamed Aziza can almost be described as a manifesto. Entitled Un ton neuf, it is a defence of abstraction and positions these artists in terms of their aims and outlook, in particular their rejection of the perceived “folklorism” of the École de Tunis. “Here we have five Tunisian painters that seek to express their feelings and anxieties in the language of their century. Here we have five Tunisian painters that reject the easy path of tawdry folk art and the temptations of cliché in favour of the difficulties of confrontation and the risks of broader horizons. Here we have the works of five painters, united in and by their creative venture, passionately committed to invention and exploration, never sure, always haunted by healthy anxiety, and loathing above all paralysis and commerce. Unquiet, aware and as though bewitched by their multiple conquests… Here we have the works of five painters who really do paint...”4
Mahdaoui’s pieces from this exhibition are extraordinarily powerful; they have titles such as Ecce homo or Le phénomène humain and in his unsettling figurative works there are even hints of the calligraphic abstraction that will come. The year 1967 was a highly significant one for a number of reasons: for the Arab world in general, June saw the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel, which created shock waves throughout the whole Middle East and North Africa; for Mahdaoui personally, in addition to the important exhibition in Tunis, this was also the year in which he met Lucio Fontana, participated in the Biennale Romana di Arte Contemporanea and something in him began to change and make him assess the artistic direction he was following. In Rome he had met Padre Di Meglio from the Vatican who asked him: “What are your origins?” and “What do you know about Arab or Islamic art?” His reply, which clearly demonstrated his ignorance of these subjects, led him to being included, later in the year, in a group visit to Istanbul, “qui m’a choqué!”. Suddenly a new world had opened for him, that he was culturally part of and yet of which he was ignorant.
In 1968, Mahdaoui decided to go to Paris and enrolled at the École du Louvre, where, in between jobs, he began to study Oriental Antiquities. A chance meeting with Michel Tapié de Céleyran turned out to be another of the key rencontres of his life. Tapié was a curator, art critic, theorist and author of the highly acclaimed Un art autre, published in 1952.5 Mahdaoui commented later that what struck him most about Tapié – a proponent of Abstract Expressionism and what he termed Art informel – was “that he focused on the art and not where an artist came from”. It was Tapié who introduced him to the work of Japanese and Iranian calligraphers. This opened his mind to the power of les gestes (gestures), as he describes these calligraphic interventions. For his part, Tapié had become interested in calligraphy and in contemporary artists who used it, particularly those from the Far and Middle East: “I would also point out in this connection that the countries with a (sometimes very long) tradition of calligraphic art are the only ones normally capable of connecting seamlessly with the most advanced sets of signs understood as abstract spaces imbued with artistic meaning, from Japan to the Islamic Mediterranean by way of China and the Middle East”.6
What Tapié saw, therefore, was contemporary calligraphic art that seamlessly and effectively created no break with the past while at the same time actively functioning within the medium of contemporary abstraction. This was a key characteristic of Lettrism, a creative movement established in Paris in 1946 by Isidore Isou that intended to establish a philosophical basis for looking at all fields of knowledge, from poetry to film, and that had a strong artistic dimension that in the 1960s was still very much alive.7
Tapié included Mahdaoui in an important exhibition in Paris, Groupe 1973; on the cover of the exhibition booklet it was stated that it included “3 Iraniens – Pilaram, Tabrizi, Zenderoudi and 3 ‘invités’ – Garcia-Mulet (Espagne), Mahdaoui (Tunisie), Piaubert (France)”.8 This was a fascinating combination of artists: in Iran as in other parts of the Middle East the Arabic script held an importance way beyond mere writing and had developed into a major art form. In Iran the Arabic script was adapted to write the Persian language and developed its own forms of script; the artists Faramaz Pilaram, Sadegh Tabrizi and Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi were prime exponents of the use of script in their art. Of the three it can be said that Zenderoudi, who had left Iran and had been living in France since 1961, was the most influenced by Lettrism. 9 The style of Mahdaoui’s paintings featured in this exhibition can be said to immediately presage the calligrams that were to become the hallmark of his work. While later he was to create his own versions of Kufic script, here the forms are rounded, full of energetic movement, occasional words or groups of letters appear and disappear.
In the Arab world, the Arabic script had begun to be used as a form of identity in abstract art; among its early exponents was the Iraqi painter Madiha Omar. There followed many others, and a term, Hurufiyya (after the Arabic word harf, meaning letter) began to be used to signify an art in which script or text was the primary feature of the work. The use of script became particularly evident post the cataclysm of June 1967, when artists and writers began to question what it was to be “an Arab” and artists such as Etel Adnan emphasized an “Arab” identity by creating word pictures in Arabic script.10 Although Mahdaoui was never interested in becoming part of a group of any kind (a point he maintained strongly), where there was a harmony of approach he would participate in joint exhibitions with other Arab artists. Significant in this regard is the group show he held in Tunis at the Maison de la Culture Ibn Rachiq in 1980 with the well-known Iraqi artist and adherent of Sufism, Shaker Hassan Al Said who had developed an entire philosophy on the use of the letter in art and whose characteristic work was inspired by the Baghdad streets, the walls of which often contained elements of Arabic graffiti.11 This exhibition, which also constituted a manifesto, was entitled Pour une esthétique du signe calligraphique dans l’art contemporain arabe. Despite their different perspectives on life, Mahdaoui recalls many hours in Baghdad and Tunis, when Shaker Hassan and other Iraqi artists visited Kairouan, discussing with him the meaning and importance of le geste and the use of the letter in abstract art.
Never interested in becoming an artist in exile, the decade between 1967 and 1977 saw Nja constantly travelling and exhibiting, as much in Paris and Rome as in Tunis. He describes these cities as just the banlieus of Tunis. In 1977 he decided to set up his atelier in La Marsa, working from there on exhibitions and lectures; since that time, ever expanding his field of horizon, he has increasingly collaborated internationally with dancers and writers. Beautiful performances and artist’s books emerge from this period; what he emphasizes is that his contribution is not mere illustration but an accompaniment, an intervention, a dialogue between word and image. Complimenting these intimate creations is the public art, his calligrams – now on a monumental scale – appearing on the walls of the airports of Riyadh and Jeddah and in the KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) Mosque in Saudi Arabia.
Nja Mahdaoui’s work has been exhibited and published widely but remarkably it is only now, in this gloriously illustrated book, with its highly informative essays by Martina Corgnati and Charbel Dagher, that the full breadth, imagination and scale of his oeuvre can be fully comprehended and appreciated.
1 This introduction has been partly based on a 2013 interview with Nja Mahdaoui.
2 Jean Duvignaud, Klee en Tunisie (Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1980).
3 Doris Bouzid, École de Tunis: un Age d’Or de la Peinture Tunisienne (Tunis: Alif – les éditions de la Méditerranée, 1995).
4 Mohamed Aziza, Un ton neuf, exhibition booklet, Tunis, Galerie Yahia, 1967. The French original reads: “Voici qu’en Tunisie, cinq peintres entendent exprimer leurs angoisses et leurs sensations dans le langage de leur siècle. Voici qu’en Tunisie, cinq peintres refusent les facilités d’un folklorisme de pacotille, les tentations du typique, et optent pour la difficulté de la confrontation et les risques de l’ouverture. Voici ici présentées, les œuvres de cinq peintres unis dans et par l’aventure créatrice, soucieux d’invention, passionnés de recherches, jamais surs, toujours possedés par la sainte angoisse, détestant par-dessus tout l’immobilismes et le commerce. Inquiets, conscients et comme fascinés par leurs multiples conquêtes… Voici, ici exposées, les œuvres de cinq peintres qui, vraiment, peignent…”.
5 Michel Tapié, Un art autre où il s’agit de nouveaux dévidages du réel (Paris: Gabriel-Giraud et fils, 1952).
6 Michel Tapié “Le message esthétique de Nja Mahdaoui”, in Calligraphies. Hommage à Nja Mahdaoui, monographic issue of Horizons Maghrébins & Cahier d'Études Maghrébines (Toulouse & Cologne, 1998), pp. 166–67. The French original reads: “Je signale à leur propos que les pays qui ont eu une tradition (quelquefois très longue) d’art calligraphique sont les seuls qui peuvent enchaîner normalement et sans rupture avec les plus actuels ensembles de signes en tant qu’espaces abstraits artistiquement signifiés, du Japon à la Méditerranée coranique en passant par la Chine et le Moyen-Orient…”.
7 http://www.mauricelemaitre.org/~pfs/what-is-lettrism/ There is also a tradition of European artists, such as Paul Klee, who used script in their work beginning in the early twentieth century.
8 This followed an exhibition in 1972, Espaces abstraits II, in which Tapié presented the same Iranian artists together with American, European and Japanese artists.
9 Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian art (London: Saqi, 2013), pp. 104 ff. This publication includes full discussion of the three Iranian artists featured in the 1973 exhibition.
10 Sonja Mechter Atassi, “Re-inscribing oneself into the Middle East: Etel Adnan and her livres d’artiste in the context of al-hurufiyya al-‘arabiyya”, in Beiruter Blätter. Mitteilungen des Orient-Instituts Beirut, no. 10–11, pp. 90–95; Venetia Porter, Word into Art: Artists of the Middle East (London: British Museum Publications, 2006).
11 Porter 2006, pp. 16 ff.