PWith the traditional Thursday openings in Casablanca, a proposition like no other. This November 7, it is within the former Smadia factory (Moroccan Company for Industrial and Agricultural Developments), at 60, boulevard Yacoub El Mansour, that around fifteen works by Faouzi Tazi are unveiled for the first time, in an off-circuit exhibition, completely independent of the galleries.
Art as an antidote
In this atypical stroll, a triptych catches the eye as soon as you enter, representing disarticulated bodies in diluted, almost pastel shades. On closer inspection, these are sheets from the Val d’Anfa clinic, painted with mercurochrome or Betadine, pigments sometimes mixed with Diprivan (short-term anesthetic agent) or other medical adjuvants.
This is because Faouzi Tazi began painting alongside his daily life as an anesthetist-resuscitator, in 2020. “I never thought about exhibiting or selling. I worked at the Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris, as well as at the Necker Hospital, before returning to Casablanca, and never held a brush before Covid. In 2020, I started buying paintings, art books, and I discovered a passion, particularly for the surrealists”, says the artist.
“I paint my life, tinged with imagination. It’s a way of exorcising everyday life. I try to describe my emotions, and since it’s not easy, I created illusions”, explains Faouzi Tazi. Dismembered bodies that evoke “all the impulses of being: good, evil, eroticism”. In addition to the human body, a few recurring motifs: the sieve, a metaphor for reality through which beings pass and from which no one escapes, and the looks, very present, as a nod to his other specialty, hypnosis.
“Faouzi is curious, daring, very courageous: he jumps into the void”, comments Fouzia Marouf, curator of the exhibition. When Salma Lahlou from Think Art asked her to accompany the artist, she immediately said yes. “Curation is writing a story. His work is shot through with real strength, and as he has a human trajectory between life and death, as he is an anesthetist-resuscitator, but also a hypnotherapist, this project was also very rich on a human level.”
If he so finely weaves the thread between tragedy and joy, life and death, it is because Faouzi Tazi is confronted with it on a daily basis through his profession, and because he himself experienced the trauma of disease. “In 1997, I was an intern at Saint-Antoine in Paris when they discovered a problem against which neither radiotherapy nor chemo could do anything, telling me that I had six months to live.remembers the visual artist. Since then, every day, I feel invulnerable, and my life is in cacophony. I exorcised my death.”
