The Forgotten Branches presents an ensemble of works standing like a tree of memory. Each one embodies a branch of the artist's thoughts. Thus, the visitors are immersed in the reminiscence of Mahfoudi's mind, witnessing his souvenirs within this forest that one calls memory.
From Kano Eitoku to Douanier Rousseau and Van Gogh, the choice of a tree as a creative or reflective subject resonates like a leitmotif. Omar Mahfoudi extends this thematic tradition by proposing a figuration on the verge of abstraction to depict his memories.
The Forgotten Branches presents an ensemble of works standing like a tree of memory. Each one embodies a branch of the artist's thoughts. Thus, the visitors are immersed in the reminiscence of Mahfoudi's mind, witnessing his souvenirs within this forest that one calls memory.
While looking through his window, Mahfoudi observes the world and lets himself dream. The tree in front of him becomes an object of fantasy: a portal to multiple horizons and temporalities, where he imagines beings in suspension. At the top of the branches, his characters overlook the world and are carried away by their thoughts. If children climb trees without fear of falling, Mahfoudi taints his work with this same freedom. The silhouettes rise, looking for an escape.
The branches extend towards the heavens while the roots penetrate the depths of the earth. The figures embrace the dream while reconnecting with their past and origins. It is how Omar Mahfoudi's nostalgic fantasy arises. This dreamlike approach explores the construction of identity as a synthesis of traditions and personal aspirations - and allows his sensitivity to flourish. Carried by his memories, Omar Mahfoudi paints liquid landscapes, crossed by solitary characters plunged into a meditative state. They emerge, like ghosts, from the depths of his memory. The swimmer, a recurring figure of his iconography, seems to have left the water of the Strait, driven by the desire to explore new elements.
As the work of Omar Mahfoudi is an extension of his being, the artist gets to explore the elements himself. The water in which his alter-egos venture shapes the line and dissolves the colour. It is both the muse and the creator. The painting Tears in my tree - portraying a young boy protected by the branches of a weeping willow - witnesses a subtle interplay between technique and subject. The teardrops arise from the movement of the matter dropping onto the canvas, driven by the water.
At a time when the world was closed for health reasons, a need for communion with nature emerged. The lockdown awakened in Omar Mahfoudi a desire for mystical exile. Personal memories and impressions of a past life where humanity lived in harmony with nature tinge this spiritual escape. On the canvas, the bodies on their perched tree rely on these ancestral entities - that seem to support them - until they fuse with the vegetation. The silent sound of the trees seems to plunge the characters into a state of complete peacefulness. It is then in this suspended place, remote from the torments of the world, that the souls can reconnect.
At the end of this journey, where memories and union meet, abstraction gives way to figuration on a monochrome background. The absence of a horizon appears like a blank page leading people to live in osmosis. Mahfoudi's art thus invites introspection and to rethink a more harmonious ecosystem.
Through this constant back and forth between past and present, memory and fantasy, the exhibition The Forgotten Branches is a return to childhood, an ode to evasion imbued with nostalgia.
