Omar Mahfoudi's solo exhibition
From Kano Eitoku to Henri Rousseau, via Vincent Van Gogh, choosing the tree as a subject of creation or contemplation has long echoed as a recurring motif. Omar Mahfoudi carries on this thematic tradition by giving life to a form of figuration on the verge of abstraction to represent his memories. Upon returning to Tangier, his hometown, the artist draws from this intimate reconnection a new emotional substance, fueling the poetic momentum of his work.
The canvases brought together in the exhibition The Forgotten Branches rise like a branching structure of memory, where each piece embodies a limb of the artist’s thoughts. The viewer is thus immersed in the recollections of Omar Mahfoudi’s mind, becoming a witness to his memories, in this forest we call memory.
It is while gazing out of his window that Omar Mahfoudi observes the world and surrenders to reverie. The tree before him becomes an object of fantasy: a portal to multiple horizons and temporalities, where he imagines suspended beings. At the treetops, his figures overlook the world and drift away in thought. Just as children climb trees without fear of falling, Mahfoudi imbues his work with that same sense of freedom. The silhouettes rise, seeking an escape.
The branches stretch toward the heavens while the roots delve deep into the earth. The figures open themselves to dreams while reconnecting with their past and origins. This is where Omar Mahfoudi’s nostalgic oneirism takes form—an oniric language that explores the construction of identity as a synthesis of tradition and personal aspiration, expressed through his sensibility. Carried by his memories, Mahfoudi paints liquid landscapes traversed by isolated figures in meditative states. They emerge like ghosts from the depths of memory. The swimmer, a recurring figure in his iconography, seems to have left the waters of the Strait, driven by a desire to explore new elements.
As Omar Mahfoudi’s work is an extension of himself, the artist too ventures into the elements. The water in which his alter-egos journey shapes the line and dissolves the color. It is both muse and medium. Tears in my tree, a painting of a young boy in tears sheltered by the drooping branches of a weeping willow, reflects this subtle interplay between technique and subject—its tears born from the movement of material flowing across the canvas, led by water.
In the continuity of his inner quest, a profound urge to reconnect with the primordial forces of nature has emerged. From it arose in Mahfoudi a desire for mystical exile. This spiritual escape is tinged with personal memories and impressions of a past life in which humanity lived in harmony with nature. On the canvas, bodies perched in trees rest upon these ancestral entities, which seem to support them, until they merge with the vegetation. The characters are immersed in a state of total calm, attuned to the silent murmur of trees. It is in this suspended space, far from the world’s turmoil, that souls may reunite.
At the end of this journey—where memory and unity intertwine—abstraction gives way to figuration on a monochromatic background. The figures in the painting Sans Horizon, initiated in stillness, seem to envision a future less tormented, more luminous. The absence of a visible horizon becomes a blank page where beings might live in harmony. Omar Mahfoudi’s art thus invites introspection, and urges us to imagine a more balanced ecosystem.
