Originally published as “Le message esthétique de Mahdaoui” in Calligraphies. Hommage à Nja Mahdaoui, monographic issue of Horizons Maghrébins & Cahier d'Études Maghrébines (Toulouse & Cologne, 1998), pp. 166-67.
Nja Mahdaoui: Jafr - The Alchemy of Signs (Milan: Skira, 2015), pp. 39-40.
Be it in the great historical continuities that are becoming or have become “classical” or in the current developments of an “other” era now taking shape after the tabula rasa of Dada, art and hence aesthetics appear when there is an assertion of the existence of a series of works of art essentially worthy of this name, where the very fact of being involves creation on the part of the artist and aesthetic communication with a no less authentic art lover, both fully qualified as such. The fact of living after a break with all possible forms of ossified academicism requires a complete reorganization of their mental and sensorial reflexes in terms of another power – starting from Cantor’s set theory, Nietzsche’s philosophy, Russell’s logic and Tristan Tzara’s Dada. In aesthetics, it is our lot to live through the first moments of a change of power of an “other” aesthetic type to be discovered and defined through undeniable works of what I have provisionally called “Art autre”, art of another kind. Mahdaoui’s works form an authentic and successful part of this.
Among the fertile paths in art that take shape in the possibilities of an indefinite polyvalency to be explored and released, Mahdaoui is particu larly aware, as an artist and in his felicitous evolution, of two that are now proving fruitful fr a certain number of creators throughout the world. I refer first of all to the lyricism of structures of expansion and then the free rigour of spaces of signs as artistically qualified sets as well as the successful melding of both in his most recent works. His pictorial works of “expansion” rub shoulders aesthetically with those of Jenkins in America, Motonaga in Japan and Kulmer in Yugoslavia, to mention just a few of the centres particularly active in the art of today.
Then there is the enthralling sequence of works that I have no hesi- tation in describing as “calligraphic”. I would also point out in this connection that the countries with a (sometimes very long) tradition of calligraphic art are the only ones normally capable of connecting seamlessly with the most advanced sets of signs understood as abstract spaces imbued with artistic meaning, from Japan to the Islamic Mediterranean by way of China and the Middle East. As sets of artistically structured signs, the “abstract spaces” of the European and American avant-garde are of the same aesthetic “type”. In this sense, Mahdaoui’s recent graphic work is constructively close to that of the Japanese Insho, Suzuki and Onishi, the Iranians Tabrizi, Barirani, Zen- deroudi and Pilaram, the Turk Nejad, the Americans Tobey and Pollock, the Europeans Capogrossi, Mathieu and de Cambiaire, and a certain number of other highly qualified artists.
Finally, in some very recent works Mahdaoui has succeeded in at- taining a synthesis of spaces of expansion and sets of signs. In this sense, he has an indefinitely developable aesthetic-artistic future ahead of him. I have complete confidence in him and thank him for the enchantment that he has given me and that he will continue to create.
Paris, Juin 1974