In memory of my father, your legacy will never fade…
إلى روح والدي ذكراك لا تموت...
Mohamed Saïd Chair: Youth in Dissonance
In a paradoxical gesture, the painter Mohamed Saïd Chair both elevates everyday Moroccan life to the stature of history painting and, in a move worthy of Caravaggio, pulls that very grandeur down from its pedestal. A discerning eye will immediately detect, in the artist’s three large-scale canvases, echoes of iconic masterpieces. At the center of a nocturnal scene unfolding around a bar counter, La dernière soirée (The Last Party), 2024-2025 - its pyramidal composition recalling Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People - two figures reenact Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Here, a bottle of mineral water presides over the act of creation: a wry, perhaps ironic nod to the growing scarcity of a resource essential to life on Earth. On the left side of the canvas, near an electric meter, a window opens strangely onto a graffiti-covered wall where one recognizes Slash, the guitarist of Guns N’ Roses, alongside the Egyptian actor Adel Imam, hero of Sherif Arafa’s popular comedy Al-Irhab Wa Al-Kabab (Terrorism and Kebab). Cosmopolitan in its references and alert to the world’s upheavals, Moroccan youth bursts into view. Bustle and idleness seem to go hand in hand in this setting.
A second canvas, Bagarre en bas de l'immeuble (Downstairs Fight), 2025, equally chaotic, unfolds in a panoramic composition structured by the rule of thirds and seemingly lit by the headlights of a car beyond the frame. On the right edge, a young man brandishes a saber, its shadow cast sharply against what appears to be a garage wall or the façade of a building, recalling the beret-wearing worker in Delacroix’s revolutionary scenes. A tipped-over teapot and small gas canister, a wooden table adorned with zellige tiles; these details suggest that the ritual of tea has, for reasons unknown, been abruptly shattered.
A third night scene, The Gamblers, 2024-2025, or “exterior night,” to borrow the vocabulary of cinema that the painting’s narrative dimension inevitably summons, appears more subdued. Male figures, their faces still partly obscured, gather around a gaming table. On the ground, a traditional rug and a pouf emblazoned with a five-pointed star recalling the Moroccan flag anchor the setting in a somewhat liminal space. At the center, a young man hides his face behind a pack of playing cards, irresistibly evoking one of the figures in Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps. These visual echoes are anything but incidental; they form a subversive act of reappropriation of an art history to which artists from the Global South now unquestionably belong. Although devoted to portraiture, Saïd Chair unsettles its conventions. He systematically conceals his subjects’ faces, redirecting attention toward bodily postures often taut with tension, toward gestures that carry an almost forensic charge. It is as though he seeks simultaneously to guide and to unsettle the viewer’s gaze.
A thousand miles away from any Orientalist or Orientalizing aesthetic that essentializes bodies and perpetuates classical or academic idealization - and against the grain of much contemporary Moroccan painting, which rarely lingers on ordinary lives - Saïd Chair’s canvases cast the spotlight on those whom Edmond Rostand, in L’Aiglon, called “the small, the obscure, the rankless”: building or parking attendants wearing the same fluorescent vests as security guards at shopping malls, delivery drivers astride their motorbikes, a prostitute in tight leather trousers and gleaming red ankle boots, idle young men and women clad in standardized sportswear brands. If this painting is romantic, it is so in its own way: in its reworking of chiaroscuro drawn from Baroque aesthetics, or in its more expressionist play of shadow and light. In a small-format canvas with a tight frame, the arm of a man in a fluorescent yellow jacket emerges from darkness; his disproportionate hand provokes a quiet but palpable unease.
To paraphrase Gilles Deleuze in L’image-mouvement (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image), what Saïd Chair paints are action-images whose indeterminate quality endures. Distinct from perception-images and affection-images, what Deleuze terms the “small form” of the action-image bears an indexical character, whereby a seemingly banal situation, such as a card game, metonymically reveals the sweep of History.
For convenience, we will call “small form” the action-image that goes from an action, a behavior, or a habitus to a partially revealed situation. […] Such a representation is no longer global, but local. It is no longer spiral, but elliptical. It is no longer structural, but event-based. It is no longer ethical, but comedic (we say “comedic” because this representation gives rise to a comedy, although it is not necessarily comic and may be dramatic).
Working in collaboration with the Tangier-based collective Momkin, dedicated to promoting theater in rural areas, and with a professional photographer, the painter begins by staging scenes in which movement is suspended, gestures frozen in anticipation before being translated into drawing and paint. Are we witnessing fights or mere games? A tenuous thread sometimes links a threatening gesture to one of solidarity or fraternity. Within this ordered chaos, dissonant realities appear to coexist in fragile peace; as in a gaming scene where, in a deliberately absurd amalgam, Monopoly, Texas Hold’em Poker, and Uno are played simultaneously. The result is the desperate vitality of a youth perpetually wagering its life in a kind of Russian roulette: disarming in its joy, precarious in its imbalance.
Olivier Rachet
