Entitled “The Mehdi Qotbi Retrospective”, the exhibition brings together around a hundred works produced since the 1960s – paintings, graphic works, tapestries and ceramics – when the artist laid the foundations of his unique style, until today when his vision continues to broaden his artistic horizons, indicates a press release from the IMA which aims, through this retrospective, to highlight the painter’s universe to form a space for dialogue between cultures and imaginations.
Like the American painters Jackson Pollock and Marc Tobey, with whom he shares a love of all-over patterns and free compositions, Qotbi favours a more intuitive visual language where writing is transformed, we read in the presentation of the exhibition.
Mehdi Qotbi’s life, it is noted, is punctuated by meetings and friendships with many writers, artists, critics who give birth to “Written Meetings” where the texts intertwine with the artist’s works. He weaves creative dialogues with Aimé Césaire, Andrée Chedid, Jacques Derrida, Octavio Paz, Nathalie Sarraute, and many others… These collaborations add a literary and poetic dimension to his work.
Influenced by Moroccan traditions and European art trends, Qotbi invented a “de-writing”, a new language where Arabic letters and signs merge.
His art “offers itself and eludes itself. Offers itself to chromatic delight. Eludes critical interpretation. It lets itself be admired and does not let itself be grasped,” observes the critic Philippe Dagen, in the exhibition book.
Close to the artist Jean-Paul Albinet with whom he studied in Toulouse, then to the lettrism of Isidore Isou and Jacques Spacagna, he distances himself from them by his approach which mixes the influences of masters such as Claude Monet and Paul Klee.
Like the American painters Jackson Pollock and Marc Tobey, with whom he shares a love of all-over patterns and free compositions, Qotbi favours a more intuitive visual language where writing is metamorphosed, it is emphasised.
For the director of the museum and exhibitions of the IMA, Nathalie Bondil, “Qotbi thus imagines a process of connecting imaginations and cultures (…). A metaphor for the beauty of our suspended voices, his alphabet of the soul proclaims an aesthetic of the universal and the discursive in shared intersubjectivities”.
“If Mehdi Qotbi makes his brush dance, wonderfully choreographing graphemes and reinventing language, he is above all an undisputed master of colors”, stressed, for his part, the president of the IMA, Jack Lang, who describes him as a “convinced universalist, cultural ambassador of the Franco-Moroccan relationship” working to build bridges of friendship and sensitivity between the continents “in a fruitful conversation with the two shores of the Mediterranean”.
Born in 1951 in Rabat, Mehdi Qotbi had a modest childhood marked by difficult living conditions that forged his resilience and optimism. From his adolescence, he developed a passion for painting. In 1967, he joined the Beaux-Arts in Rabat, where his meeting with Jilali Gharbaoui, a pioneer of abstraction in Morocco, was decisive. In 1969, Mehdi Qotbi left Morocco for France, where he obtained his diploma from the Beaux-Arts in Toulouse in 1972, before continuing his studies in Paris. Between 1973 and 2007, he taught visual arts while pursuing his artistic career. His work is exhibited in international museums, supported by critics such as Pierre Restany and Gilbert Lascault.
Since 2011, as president of the National Foundation of Museums of Morocco, Mehdi Qotbi has been committed to making art accessible to all, asserting that museums must bring humans and cultures together.
2024-09-23 09:13:06