black with a mount · Casablanca · Grammar of 1962 onward
The Terrace Wave
In the grammar of the Casablanca School · Grammar of 1962 onward · Casablanca
- Giclée on 200gsm archival matte, pigment inks
- Printed to order in Europe and posted to you
- Framing is optional, and framed prints arrive ready to hang
About this piece
The wave is the form the Casablanca painters kept returning to: a hard-edged band, flat colour, no modelling, borrowed from craft rather than from Europe. In 1962, six years after independence, Farid Belkahia took over the Casablanca art school and threw out the colonial syllabus; with Melehi, Chabâa, Toni Maraini and Bert Flint he built a modernism out of zellij, carpets and tattoos, and explicitly against orientalist figuration. None of their canvases are reproduced here and none can be. The argument is what we take.
Grammar, not a work
The artists of this movement are still in copyright and none of their paintings are reproduced here. What we take is the grammar — the flat fields, the hard edge, the refusal of the easel — the way a painter takes a manner without taking a picture.
