CAR Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Italy of Moroccan-born artist Omar Mahfoudi (Tangier, 1981. Based in Paris). On this occasion, Mahfoudi presents a series of works that encapsulate the essence of his artistic exploration in recent years. The exhibition is curated by Andrea Busto, in collaboration with AFIKARIS gallery in Paris.
EXISTENCES LOST IN THE LIQUIDNESS OF AN INDETERMINATE SPACE
The more I plunge my gaze in Rain, Steam and Speed by Joseph Mallord William Turner, the more I glimpse figures fading and emerging from the luminous mists so dear to the artist. His evanescent, dewy brushstrokes dissolve into the vastness of space and atmosphere, concealing and revealing tiny bodies that enact seemingly insignificant scenes: a boat gliding on translucent waters, people flailing arms from the riverbank, oxen tilling the soil with a plough guided by a farmer, a hare running along the tracks to avoid the oncoming steam train. Characters, animals, and objects are entangled in the sublime and romantic material magma of color spread across the canvas, which, like a trap, imprisons them. To bring the vision of the indefinite work into focus, and to grasp those fragments of reality—otherwise imperceptible from a distance due to their subtle and cunning blending into the painting—the artist compels us to observe the canvas up close. Hypnotized, we are drawn to lean into the “painted space,” sucked into an ephemeral, intangible, and impalpable vortex.
In a similarly romantic, though colder and more descriptive dimension, where subjects are not merely suggested but depicted in every detail, Caspar David Friedrich invites us to pause in front of his works, mirroring the posture of the figures seen from behind. As in Magritte’s La reproduction interdite, these figures double and multiply into the observer, superimposing us and multiplying us in the painting, making us actors in the same play.
These mysterious figures, whose faces are hidden, gaze into the horizon, placing us in the role of spectators of the infinite. Like them, we peer into the canvas/space, becoming echoes of the painted characters. We share their anguish in the face of the immense unknown that offers no escape, scanning the ether for a visual anchor that might affirm the presence of something beyond. We watch hopefully at sunsets and sunrises that fade sublimely into the vast, iridescent sky, searching for meaning in our earthly existence.
Omar Mahfoudi favors recognizable characters and figures, blending techniques, the spirit and the feeling of void of Turner and Friedrich. He offers canvases where paint drips and cascades vertically, engulfing the portrayed figures who often gaze at us inquisitively. Radiant suns, round and dripping like punctured egg yolks, spill over the heads of his subjects, bathing them in incandescent smears. The turquoise sky, the red sun, and flesh-toned, earthen, or indigo-blue figures melt into tears of pure paint, transforming the canvas into a multicolored rain-soaked place.
The dissolution and washing away of the material creates a tension in the viewer, who attempts—with their gaze—to eliminate this process, trying to freeze the pigments sliding downward to “rescue” the figures from vanishing. These characters, with questioning eyes, implicitly plead with us to stop the disintegration of the liquid that composes them, to save them from their imminent dissolution. And we, helpless, like before ghosts fading into thin air, attempt to decode them, to perceive them, and to return their gaze empathically just before their final disappearance.
Others appear as tiny silhouettes drowned in color—like Turner’s figures engulfed in the magma of paint—depicted imperceptibly and indefinitely to transport us to a vast and distant space, where the immensity and solitude of the setting—whether sea, sky, or desert— evoke an unfathomable inner void akin only to the Leopardi’s shepherd. This is not, in fact, a tragic moment in the romantic sense, but rather an awareness of a vanitas, echoing the famous Latin phrase “sic transit gloria mundi”.
Thus, the artwork, like a contemporary memento mori devoid of finality’s tragedy, does not end but regenerates itself through its own dissolution—like an incarnate Buddha presenting a reality in which nothing is created or destroyed, but everything changes, everything transforms into different matter that remains active, alive, and present, though altered.
There’s no real need to evoke modern artists to trace Mahfoudi’s roots: they are so evident that naming them would almost seem like an insult to the viewer/reader. Yet one name must
be mentioned: Emil Nolde. Especially through his flowers and landscapes in watercolor, expanded on paper in large, uncontrolled blurs and anarchic extensions, Nolde more than anyone seems to have significantly influenced Mahfoudi’s creativity. The artist himself confesses in an interview: “I was mainly inspired by books, which were like small windows to the outside world. I was discovering the past of art through art history. I was quite fascinated by the idea of expression. I really liked German Expressionism. Someone described my art as tortured because it comes from within. I don’t draw inspiration from the outside. I reject any external influence to avoid a folkloristic, Orientalist representation that often recurs in Moroccan painting”. His work is thus inwardly poetic, removed from contingent reality, even if figurative. The details of landscapes are mere pretexts to spark a dialogue on the spaces of the soul, of feeling, and of inspiration. Abstract terms to speak of reality as the sublimation of lived experience, seen through small windows opening onto an inner world in liquid, indeterminate spaces, beyond the confines of today’s temporal reality.
