It was gray and cold that day in Paris. An autumn drizzle drowned the facades of the island of Saint-Louis, an insidious cold crept into the gaps in the passers-by’s clothes. Brrrr… Fortunately, a spot of color brightened up the facade of the beautiful building of the Institut du Monde Arabe, a joyful spot which announced a retrospective of the work of Mehdi Qotbi. Well, let’s go in!
A few steps down from the ground floor and, forgetting the bad weather outside, we change universe, we enter the welcoming, radiant and mystical world of a painter who has been tracing his work for half a century. furrow of light.
What strikes you first, in this pleasant stroll through the bowels of the IMA, is this obvious fact: there is in Qotbi’s Art an unusual degree of concentration on a few primary (and therefore essential) pictorial properties. ): surface, color, repetition. The latter often involves letters of the Arabic alphabet. Some then talk about calligraphy – but is that really what it is?
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Calligraphy, if we stick to this sometimes overused noun, takes on an original dimension, unique to Qotbi: active speech (the mental pronunciation of the letters and the words they form) fades. What then emerges is an abstract image, with strong pictorial value, and of which it would not be excessive to assert that it reaches the inexpressible – but it is not an indescribable in the sense of an excess of tragedy, of something beyond drama: quite the contrary, it is a diffuse serenity that gives rise to this absence of immediate meaning. In other words, if there is nothing to read, there is much to feel. The intellect is annihilated (this is the f’na of the Sufis), intuition (the dawq) alone allows us to grasp what is at stake.
Exactly, what is at stake? When words fail, there remains this irrepressible inclination which pushes man towards this kind of poetry without words in which “perfumes, colors and sounds respond to each other”. And all this makes up landscapes of letters and colors, harmonious compositions, which we never tire of contemplating, as the mastery of color and form is patent; we never tire of contemplating them to the point that we begin, in sweet drowsiness, to daydream a little, yet a few meters from the hustle and bustle of Paris, as the palette and composition give the work an undeniable dreamlike quality.
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Let us leave it to the specialists to discuss the various techniques implemented by Qotbi. What struck me is that even if it is clear that we can easily detect a clear evolution of his art, from the beginnings still marked by a certain timidity to the lyricism of more recent paintings, he Despite everything, throughout these years, there is a certain constancy, a loyalty to an aesthetic choice undoubtedly born in adolescence. Unlike Max Ernst, for example, whose style was a sort of choppy journey of successive denials, regrets, repentances, Qotbi remained himself, while renewing himself. If the paintings of maturity have acquired a certain gravity, they do not betray the intuition of childhood, which perhaps relates to this depth psychology which exceeds the skills of your columnist.
We emerge from this retrospective energized, ready to face the Parisian grayness, and we strongly recommend, without reservation, to all those whose steps would take them towards the French capital to plunge, in their turn, into this bath of rejuvenation offered by this superb retrospective.
