The exhibition brings together around a hundred works created since the 1960s (paintings, graphic works, tapestries and ceramics), when the artist laid the foundations of his unique style, until today when his vision continues to broaden his artistic horizons.
Influenced by Moroccan traditions and European art trends, Qotbi invents a “de-writing” where the lines intertwine and vibrate in incantatory rhythms.
His art, observes the critic Philippe Dagen, in the exhibition catalogue, “offers itself and eludes itself. Offers itself to chromatic delight. Eludes critical interpretation. It lets itself be admired and does not let itself be grasped.”
“A convinced universalist, a cultural ambassador of the Franco-Moroccan relationship, he builds bridges of friendship and sensitivity between the continents (…) in a fruitful conversation with the two shores of the Mediterranean” notes Jack Lang, president of the IMA.
For Jack Lang, “If Mehdi Qotbi makes his brush dance, wonderfully choreographing graphemes and reinventing language, he is above all an undisputed master of colors.”
Close to the artist Jean-Paul Albinet with whom he studied in Toulouse, then to the Lettrism of Isidore Isou and Jacques Spacagna, he distances himself from them by his approach which mixes the influences of masters such as Claude Monet – whose “Nymphéas” he admires – and Paul Klee. Like the American painters Jackson Pollock and Marc Tobey, with whom he shares a love of all-over patterns and free compositions, Qotbi favors a more intuitive visual language, where writing is transformed into an infinite graphic dance, notes a press release from the IMA.
Mehdi Qotbi’s life is punctuated by meetings and friendships with many writers, artists, critics who give birth to “Written Encounters” where texts intertwine with the artist’s works. He weaves creative dialogues with Aimé Césaire, Andrée Chedid, Jacques Derrida, Octavio Paz, Nathalie Sarraute, and many others. These collaborations, true poetic-artistic encounters, add a literary dimension to his work, where words become as many signs, integrated into his compositions.
According to Nathalie Bondil, director of the museum and exhibitions at the IMA, “Qotbi thus imagines a process of connecting, in a non-hierarchical world, imaginations and cultures. A metaphor for the beauty of our suspended voices, his alphabet of the soul proclaims an aesthetic of the universal and the discursive in shared intersubjectivities.”
Born in 1951 in Rabat, Mehdi Qotbi had a modest childhood marked by difficult living conditions that forged his resilience and optimism. From his adolescence, he developed a passion for painting. In 1967, he joined the Beaux-Arts in Rabat, where his meeting with Jilali Gharbaoui, a pioneer of abstraction in Morocco, was decisive.
In 1969, Mehdi Qotbi left Morocco for France, where he graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Toulouse in 1972, before continuing his studies in Paris. Between 1973 and 2007, he taught visual arts while pursuing his artistic career. His work is exhibited in international museums, supported by critics such as Pierre Restany and Gilbert Lascault.
Since 2011, as president of the National Foundation of Museums of Morocco, Mehdi Qotbi has been committed to making art accessible to all, asserting that museums must bring humans and cultures together.
