By Nii B. Andrews.
Yasmine Alaoui stood in the midst of her awesome canvases of her solo exhibition on the second floor of the CMG.
It was opening night at the 1-54 in Kech.
Any attempt to greet or congratulate her had to be done without physical contact.
“I am nursing a cold”, she explained politely.
But all around her was a captive international audience and her new genre of paintings.
The canvases had twisting, turning, lithe and sometimes grotesque shadowy obviously nude beige body parts in faint pastel colors that complimented the light tan immaculate parquet floors of the brightly lit gallery space.
“What do you think of the work?”, her teenage son asked me.
“She is untouchable; on a powerful mission to speak truth”, I responded, “ her work is strong”.
The paintings never once showed any faces, only parts of bodies in various dynamic postures; turning, moving, reclining within an ethereal backdrop.
Are these real people or apparitions; are we real?
What conflicts engulf and engage us; are they based on personality or principle?
Why does Alaoui not show us faces?
Why does one painting show us a bottle in the lower left of the frame; is it an invitation to sample or discard the contents; what are the contents anyway?
One perspective is that the paintings are an eloquent critique of the representation of the nude figure and the gaze as a tool of domination.
In a deliberate and methodical manner, Alaoui was taking us beyond the tortured odalisques of the colonial project – some of the most famous are, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814; Louvre, Paris) and later examples by Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse.
If indeed art is an “armchair for a tired businessman”, then Alaoui’s lyrical urgency challenges and debunks this notion; her work exposes the underlying violence of such imagery and representation.
And perhaps to buttress this are a set of paintings of figures wearing the Haik- in total contradistinction to the nude faceless figures.
Today, the Haik that has been worn for centuries is often the subject of less than complimentary commentary and attitudes.
Alaoui renders these single figures bathed in light coming from geometrical apertures of architectural edifices located in the background thus enhancing the clothed figure’s presence and domination of the frame.
Is this a reference to the work of Gaëtan de Clérambault, the artist and pioneering psychiatrist who saw and recorded for posterity the sublime poetry of Haik drapery and its allusions to resistance, rebellion, oppression, social politics, female agency and context?
Yet again, the Haik ensures that there are no faces.
Hicham Dauodi the indefatigable curator and proprietor of CMG summarizes the artist’s latest ouevre best: “Yasmina Alaoui is no longer content to explore themes, she imposes a singular pictorial language, a gesture where femininity becomes the very locus of human ambivalence. Between life and death, there is no clear dividing line here”.
“SARABANDE”, the solo of Yasmina Alaoui at Comptoir des Mines Galerie, Marrakech: Thursday, February 5, to March 8.
First glance: Renaissance meets Impressionism. Strongly spiritual.
World is constantly producing very engaging creators.
She is really talented. Woooow.
She is skilled and subtle with her paint brush.
The eloquence in your writing on the subject matter does a marvelous job.
NB, Very well written…….and fit for publication in any top notch art or culture magazine.