Modern Painters

REVIEWSextravagantly ornamented alcoves on the courtyard ofEl Bahia. Rooted in foundations of Islamic art, theCasablanca School produced Maghreb modernism,a style privileging nonrepresentation and graphicgeometry. Though established by French authorities in1945, the Casablanca School was remodeled by itsartists in 1964 to refl ect their newfound autonomy—both political and aesthetic. Farid Belkahia (1934–2014), a lifelong resident of Marrakech, led the Schoolof Fine Art in Casablanca. Postcolonial aesthetics,the result of both his education in Paris and hisestablished family’s extensive collection of traditionalMoroccan artisanry, are bent into his bold organicabstractions, molded in copper, wax, and the region’srichly tanned leathers. Mohammed Melehi, stillpainting in Marrakech and Tangier, presents a seriesof sunny canvases in a candy palette, fi zzy expression-ist panels and color-blocked rainbows similar infeeling to the nearby work of Mohammed Chabâa,whose traditional canvases host brazen forms,with conceptual underpinnings drawn from FrantzFanon and Henri de Saint-Simon. The torch is thenpassed to Yto Barrada, whose Appliqué MajdoubFlag, 2016, uses lines written by 16th-centuryMaghreb poet Abderrahman al-Majdoub in flagspastiched from bourgeois Moroccan settings.The visual history of the African diaspora isannotated through the inclusion of three African-American artists, two of whom were born inthe 1930s: Mississippi-raised Color Field painterSam Gilliam shows vast draped canvases saturatedin a gradient of color washes. And the late AlLoving, who also translated painting into sculpture,challenged Minimalism’s exclusions of his racial andsociopolitical categorization. His heavily textured,loosely woven hanging works appear like canvasesravaged by the poverty and violence that thedominant aesthetics of the latter half of the 20thcentury dismissed. David Hammons, born a decadelater than Gilliam and Loving, includes his politicallyaltered version of the American fl ag, in which itstraditional colors are replaced with the Pan-Africantrio of red, green, and black.Without white exhibition walls to fortress them, theworks in “Quoi de Neuf Là” confront their intricatehistorical sites. The Otolith Group’s neatly condensedfi lm In the Year of the Quiet Sun, 2013, considers thechronicle of the postage stamp as a map of post-colonial image compression. Palestinian artist KhalilRabah’s looping, emotive conceptual videos, shownon box monitors among the relics inside the nearfossilized Dar Si Saïd, exercise the tools that constructnationalism and social identity, proposing objects towrite these narratives as seemingly arbitrary as thetaxonomy we already use. Screened in the catacombsunderneath the massive Koutoubia Mosque, KWASSAKWASSA, 2015, a poetic documentary by Superfl ex,traces the depleted political history of Mayotte, a smallisland off Madagascar that wistfully returned itselfto France as a colony in 2014 and is now part of theEuropean Union.What does the state owe to its own artistic culture,its evolving forms of citizenship, and thoseparticipating in its society outside of its own borders?The exhibition was dedicated to Leila Alaoui, aMoroccan photographer and activist who died aftersustaining wounds in a terrorist attack in Burkina Fasoearlier this year. The binds of tragedy keep art alive alittle longer. —Jennifer Piejko96 MODERN PAINTERS JUNE/JULY 2016BLOUINARTINFO.COMEl AnatsuiKindred Viewpoints,2016. Aluminumand copper wire,55 x 70 ft.JENS MARTIN AND MARRAKECH BIENNALE