The Musical Morphology of Signs or
When the Pen dances, the Ink Sings but the Song is Abstract
By Rose Issa
When non-Arab or Iranians discover Nja Mahdaoui’s work for the first time, they feel intrigued and bewildered by the possible meaning of the work or what the work may say. Those familiar with Arabic script try very hard to read and find a word that they can understand. Both approaches are unnecessary, as Mahdaoui simply uses the morphology of a script, the curves and lines that direct him to mean nothing else but a possible musical sign, a sign to dance or to enjoy. For Mahdaoui’s work is totally abstract. It is simply the beauty of the work that overwhelms the viewers.
Despite knowing Nja Mahdaoui’s work for many years, I first met the artist in 1988 at the Baghdad International Biennale, right after the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 88 – the first “Biennale” since the Seventies, and never held since. It was an exceptional event that witnessed a wonderful gathering of artists including the late painter-sculptors Shaker Hassan Al Said , Ismail Fatah, Noha Al Radi, and many others, mostly from non-Western countries. By then Mahdaoui had already exhibited with Shaker Hassan Al Said in Tunis , a few years earlier. We were all very impressed that despite Saddam, every crossroad or new building had to incorporate commissioned artworks.
Mahdaoui and I met again in 1992 in Tunis, at the Carthage Film Festival. By the 1980s Tunis had become the new hub of Arab cultural activity, replacing a ravaged Beirut . Tunis was bustling with film, music and theatre festivals, and I was delighted to discover how involved Mahdaoui was with his circle of dancers, musicians, writers, poets and theatre people. Always hyperactive and curious, he knew many key figures on the arts scene, collaborating with some, and recommending emerging talents, many of whom he discovered. “La vie c’est être dans l’action,” he often says. “Life is about being where the action is.”
Naturally, the next meeting was in his studio. In Mahdaoui’s case, his studio was his entire house, at once organic and controlled. “I am all this,” he would say of his workspace. “My books are behind me, the works are all around. My studio is my home.”
Born in Tunis in 1937, Nja Mahdaoui started his career as an artist in the early Sixties, while Europe was swinging; Czechoslovakia was met with Russian tanks; Vietnam was burning under US napalm bombs; and the Arab world struggled to recover from the morally devastating effects of Israeli invasions, all supported by the West. Anti-colonial sentiment had evolved into disenchantment with the West’s double standards. So how did this Tunisian Arab artist found his own path, after travelling extensively, mainly in France and Italy, in search of an artistic life?
When asked to cite his influences, Mahdaoui mentions his mother, who died when he was young and whose calligraphic embroideries left an enduring mark; his father, who encouraged him to travel; the exaltation and relief of Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956; the Peres Blancs Catholic missionaries, who encouraged him to study art books; many literary schools of thought, from French and German philosophers to Persian and Arab Sufi mystics; and the Dante Alighieri Italian Cultural Centre, which hosted his first exhibition in the early 1960s
These early encouragements took him to Palermo and Rome and led to graduating from the Accademia di Sant’Andrea (Rome, 1965-1967), followed by important exhibitions in Tunis at Galerie Yahya in 1967, and participating in the Biennale of Rome the same year.
Mahdaoui then moved to Paris where he lived from 1968 to 1977. He enrolled in a two-year studio residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts and later at the École du Louvre in the Department of Oriental Antiquities.
A crucial encounter, earlier in Italy and later again in Paris in 1968, changed the course of his artistic life – his meeting with the French art critic, curator and collector, Michel Tapié. The nephew of Toulouse Lautrec, Tapié was the foremost art critic of his time, and wrote several essays and books on art. Tapié defended abstract expressionism, and coined the term “Art Informel”.
Taking Mahdaoui under his wing, Tapié introduced him to many artists and galleries and to the Italian and Paris vibrant and lively art scenes, all of which would open new perspectives to his artistic practice. Mahdaoui discovered the works of Japan, China and Iran’s most innovative artists – Hossein Zenderoudi, Faramarz Pilaram, Maliheh Afnan and Reza Mafi – with whom he later exhibited at the Galleria Cortina in Milan in 1972 and at the Galerie Cyrus in Paris in 1973 .
In 1969, within a year of arriving in Paris, Mahdaoui landed two solo exhibitions in commercial galleries there, Galerie La Galère and Galerie Entremonde. These were followed soon after with a solo exhibition in Tunis at Galerie Yahya, in 1973.
Tapié’s introduction to international art movements, and the European scene in particular, opened doors for Mahdaoui, led not only to self-examination, but nurtured the fusion of graphic styles that would express his ideas.
He uncovered the power of gesture, combined with immersion in one’s cultural past.
Calligraphy has been for centuries an art par excellence in the Islamic world as well as the East. Referencing their non-Western masters became a route to originality and sincerity for many non-western artists.
And so, Mahdaoui chose to release the letter from the burden of literal and formal transmission, raising the flourish of strokes to a purely visual experience. Reconceived through Mahdaoui’s diverse brushstrokes, script morphed into transfixing imagery. Some have mistakenly suggested that he was trying to destroy the letter, but he was in fact deconstructing it. Exercising his hand with various drafting techniques, trends and concepts, Mahdaoui “wanted to avoid sliding into any of the major schools of painting” he once told me.
The Lettrism movement, founded by Isidore Isou in the 1940s was still going strong at that time. Keeping a healthy distance from all such influences, Mahdaoui’s encounters, discoveries and hard work florished in an explosion, freeing him of all established methods. Of one thing he was sure: the ancestral conventions of calligraphy could be abandoned. Working furiously, obsessively, with prodigal inventiveness, he was on the road to perfecting his signature style.
Throughout that decade, Mahdaoui travelled regularly to Tunis and North Africa, exhibiting there and in Italy almost on a yearly basis. So, in 1977, it felt natural to return to Tunis, to La Marsa precisely, a residential suburb near Carthage, where he still lives and works.
Meanwhile, thanks to oil price adjustments in the early Seventies, Iran and the Arab world prospered, while the European importers were facing their own economical crisis . As a result, the region’s funding increased significantly to purchase art and support arts institutions, thus not only acquiring western art but mainly promoting its own culture.
In the Seventies, Western artists generally disagreed about which direction art should take; it was a decade of uncertainties. But artists in emerging countries, particularly Iran and the Arab world, enjoyed a brief flowering of independence. They sought a fresh language, free of the West’s, to avoid the trap of seeming derivative. How to avoid imitating imitations?
By the time Mahdaoui returned to Tunis in 1977, the school of art known as École de Tunis was in decline. Predominant from the 1940s to the 1970s, this style had opened a window on Tunisian life, through brightly-coloured figurative work.
But Mahdaoui has never been attracted to any traditional look, traditional tools, or ready-made ideas and disciplines. Because he had no formal training in calligraphy, he insists on saying, “I am not a calligrapher.” Mahdaoui, from the start, favoured unconventional devices, using instruments for architectural drafting, cartography and laboratory illustration, or a feather and other found objects. “Using traditional tools freezes me and stops me from working,” he says. “I need my own input, my own stamp, my own self-adapted tools to find my signature style.”
His love of music and dance, his many collaborations with local and international musicians, dancers and writers, gave Mahdaoui the opportunity to expand and constantly renew his artistic language, his lines, curves and contours, in many disciplines and medias. Working with his improvised pens, morphing letters into pure imagery, his gestures, Calligrams or Graphemes twirl and gambol, like a dance or musical flourish. It is enough to witness him performing, whether on a semi-nude body , or as he dissolves colour from a large denim canvas, to recognize Mahdaoui is a choreographer of letters.
Mahdaoui continues to love and be excited by collaborations, transforming a poet’s words into images (Michel Butor, Salah Stétié), images into chimerical words (Michèle Drouin), where by magic, none of the lines or shapes are readable. He continues to work, even today, with young fashion designers (Amel Esseghir - Tunisia, Marios Schwab - London), continually expanding his “calligraphic” language. His curiosity is limitless.
Mahdaoui’s work comes in a variety of sizes and medias: miniature parchments, labyrinthine canvases, sculptures, monumental airplane fuselage , huge woven tapestries in airports reception pavillions , the sculpted architectural contour of a mosque , limited edition book illustrations in collaboration with poets, painters and scholars, drums and tambourines (The British Museum, London, 1996), or simply the skin of a body. He of course loves the many paper supports, from papyrus to Japanese rice, or parchments.
Working by instinct, with obsessive precision and great intensity, he transcends the curves and lines, with essence and evocation. Mahdaoui’s journey into past and recent cultural histories, with his bursts of spontaneous creation, make him today one of the Arab world’s most meticulous, focused, talented and productive artists. He has inspired many followers, although few can emulate his unique, complex and intricate work.