Painter Mohamed Hamidi was part of the influential Casablanca Group and a founding member of the Moroccan Association of Plastic Arts—influential movements in decolonising modern art in Morocco. He is known for colourful abstractions and semi-figurative works that evoke both erotic motifs and traditional symbols and patterns of African crafts.
Read MoreBorn in Casablanca, Mohamed Hamidi grew up making wall drawings. Completing studies at the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca in 1958, Hamedi moved to Paris the following year. There, he joined the Atelier de la Grande Chaumière, before studying at the Paris School of Crafts and the Paris School of Fine Arts. From 1962, Hamidi studied under French painter and muralist Jean Aujame.
Returning to Morocco, Hamidi came back to the Casablanca School of Fine Arts as a professor. His modernist compatriots included Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, Mohamed Ataallah, and Mohamed Chabaa, among others.
Organising themselves under the banner of the Casablanca Art School, their 1969 outdoor manifesto exhibition, Présence Plastique, in Jemaa el-Fnaa Square, Marrakesh was a seminal moment in the history of Moroccan modernism. Hamidi later went on to co-found the Moroccan Association of Plastic Arts in 1972.
Mohamed Hamidi paints erotically tinged abstracted forms, and spaces defined by recurring use of line and interpenetrating planes of colour. Reflective of Moroccan and European modernist influences, the visual language circumvents taboos around their erotic subjects.
Upon his return to Morocco in the mid-1960s, Mohamed Hamidi was spurred on by his Casablanca Art School compatriots to pursue a distinctly Moroccan style. European influences of cubism, nudes, and still life are melded with Moroccan aesthetic traditions found in carpets, jewellery, and ceramics.
Early works such as Détente (1968) and Harmonie (1969) use very simple geometric forms: circles, semi-circles, and rectangles. The colour, shape, and pattern of Harmonie is evocative of Moroccan carpets—albeit in simplified form.Détente utilises contrasts of colour, with a hard-edged rectangular intrusion into a grey square space containing a curvaceous white form. It subtly hints at eroticism through geometric interpenetrating shapes. This intruding element began to take a more overtly phallic form in later works of the 1960s and 1970s.
Mohamed Hamidi's paintings from the 1970s became crisper in the employment of colour and line, and more refined in their abstract erotic depictions. These works build on the simple language of circular and curvilinear forms for female, and more hard-edged, interpenetrating shapes for male.
A vertically split Composition from 1971 presents two distinctly vulvar forms, one above the other. Concentric vulvar shapes of contrasting colours sit along a line dividing the red and black background. These are set against two fleshy pink shapes that extend out from the vulvar forms, producing breast-like curves at the ends with small nipple-like extrusions.
In a Composition from 1977, the artist presents a simplified yellow bird form, shown in profile. Its neck and head extend to from a phallic shape, poking out of the blue oval containing it. This is a motif that has expanded and developed throughout the artist's work.
Through the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Hamidi produced a range of abstract and figurative works. Some played on recurring motifs while also experimenting with new levels of figuration and abstraction.
In an untitled work from 1987, the artist produced a figure whose head and facial features evoke the African mask forms that had so interested European modernists in the early 20th century. The figure's face reflects traditional Moroccan and north African patterns. At the other end of the spectrum, Hamidi produced a series of 'Compositions' in the 1990s that resemble colourful patchworks of colour, where the artist has focused on creating texture and marks on the painted surface.
Around 2020, Hamidi's crisp Untitled paintings—made with cellulosic paint on canvas—began to regularly incorporate the flying bird motif. It is a simplified motif, presenting an almost top-down perspective: two semi-circles for wings, a tail, and a protruding head and neck that appear distinctly phallic in shape. Often flying headfirst into red-orange sun-like concentric circles, or diamond and vulvar shapes, the motif serves as an erotic metaphor on canvas. Towards the early 2000s, cross signs, arrows, and other symbols also made an appearance in Hamidi's work.
Mohamed Hamidi has carried out frescoes and wall paintings in Morocco and abroad. He was among the first artists to decorate the old white walls of Asilah during the first annual Asilah arts festival in 1978. In 2005, Hamidi brought around 20 painters to Azemmour to paint a series of murals in the medina.
On Ocula the artist is represented by La Galerie 38.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021
