1969 - Mahdaoui the Alchemist

               Mahdaoui the man shines through the subtle balance and apparent incoherence of his collages: wholeheartedly committed to communication between human beings, impassioned to the point of absurdity. If forced to apply the customary categories to his painting, we would immediately say: impressionist and surrealistic. Mahdaoui agrees without a flicker of hesitation, even though his large chromatic compositions recall Pop Art with the use of a whole variety of unexpected materials and objects on the surface.

 

              No matter what the cost, he has to express his world. The bits of iron welded according to the fancy of a mood or the illumination of an instant, the screws, the nuts, the dials of clocks, laughable refuse of this century of steel, bring us back to the poet’s question: “Objets inanimés, avez-vous donc une âme?” (Alphonse de Lamartine). In any case, the painter seizes upon them as direct symbols of humanity and introduces them into his “artistic dialectics”. The “dead object” thus finds a second life thanks to the artist.
              I took him by surprise in the midst of his works in his studio in the Cité Internationale des Arts. It must be confessed that getting Mahdaoui to talk about himself and his work was singularly difficult, not because he ducked my questions but because the painter, just like his works, is perplexing. It is as though his thoughts followed no guiding thread, as though various ideas were being developed simultaneously. It is thus not infrequent for him to abandon one painting to start on another, which then gives way immediately to a third. He puts forward an idea, develops it for a moment and then, with no warning, switches to another subject. What follows is the essence of a conversation, sometimes whispered, sometimes confrontational. Mahdaoui does not talk. He expresses himself with all of his body, eyelids half-closed, slender hands of incredible mobility. And at the end of the phrase, a laughter…

 

              Nja Mahdaoui is a striking example of intellectual mobility, which drives him in pursuit of a hypothetical peak and a factitious balance. He acknowledges his awareness of the sterility of the pursuit he has been undertaking for years.

              I took the liberty of saying in his presence that his choice of colours was indicative of an exclusively African vocation for irrationality and violence. He took this opportunity for a vehement assertion of his cultural identity.

 

              "I am an African and an Arab. It is normal that my painting should contain certain resurgences of this. It is for this reason that I coldly accept the accusation of being outmoded, of following pointlessly in the Surrealists’ footsteps. But where then did Picasso, Braque and Klee find their signs and help to revolutionize Western painting if not in our land, in Africa? When the Muslim architects of the Islamic Golden Age composed their magnificent arabesques, the European artists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance devoted themselves solely to the reproduction of faces and bodies.
     When African painters show their work, people always expect to see camels, scenes of dancing or bush landscapes.
     Europe gave us a crust of its culture and we are all cultural monsters. Instead of drinking it all down, we should only take the ABC, we should set off in search. In any case, I’m against partitions and in favour of planetary opening.

              Mahdaoui could have taken the facile path of conventional appeal but the idea of exploiting a cliché infuriates this fanatic of colour, who burned several of his canvases one day to great dismay of his friends.

              His pictorial approach also concerns man’s struggle against moral isolation, the fight of a man deserted by his passions and confronted with relentless, withering logic. Waiting kills and Nja Mahdaoui refuses to wait. He embraces the present moment furiously in an attempt to capture it in matter. And when he realizes that this matter is fleeting and ephemeral, the only thing left is to run, as he has been doing for years now.

 

              It just remains to say a word about the interference between Mahdaoui’s painting and certain new literary developments. I quote here this description by the Tunisian writer Salah Garmadi, which is perhaps no more than the literary transcription of a work by the painter: “Man is spaghetti-like. It is death with a shaven skull that wove the heart and the crutch. The enucleated eye is white and with no love for its brother, the heart of a yellow clock that beats no more. Man is a spider with a homicidal web. Sex, black ribs of an absent, sunless parasol, man does have a head but it is Hiroshima without love... Man is not only absent from the world, it is as though he has never been there”.
              The esotericism of this formulation is perhaps surprising but, enigmatic though it may be, it clearly indicates the narrowness of the path embarked upon by the Tunisian painter. In expressing these phobias and his fear through the total negation of man – be it nothing but a reflection – Mahdaoui contributes in his way to the advent of this “new” man of the Third World whose essential characteristic will be cultural univerality.

 

Moncef S. Badday