Artist's presentation
Najia Mehadji was born in Paris in 1950.
She lives and works in Paris (France) and Essaouira (Morocco).
By the 1970s, Mehadji’s oeuvre was already marked by a “tangible abstraction” that derived simultaneously from contemporary music and from her work on the body in the experimental environment of the Université de Paris VIII. During this period she presented several performances that incorporated drawing and sound; she also contributed to the feminist review Sorcières, which published her early drawings.
In 1974 she earned a master’s degree in visual arts and art history from the Université de Paris I, and also attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
In the 1980s, Mehadji began to investigateterrogate the materials of pictorial practice. She decided to employ unusual media such as gesso and transparent paper on large pieces of raw canvas in order to generate symbolic, highly architectured, geometric forms.
In 1985 she spent a year in Essaouira, Morocco, on an extra-mural scholarship from the Villa Medicis. Mehadji would later return there with increasingly frequency, producing her Icare series in Essaouira. This cycle came to a close in 1994 with the Coupole series, which explicitly referred to Islam and signaled her interest in transcultural architectural forms.
In 1996, Mehadji changed technique and hence style, adopting large oil pastels that enabled her to draw long, continuous lines on raw canvas, generating spheres of pure reds or yellows, which yielded three series known as Gradients, Chaosmos, and Souira.
In 1997 she taught drawing for a year as a guest artist at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Her recent works display a symbolism related to nature, notably to the cosmos and the plant kingdom, establishing a logical counterpoint to the geometric forms of her early career. Hence the “structures of flux” as exemplified by the Fleur-flux series, in which Mehadji revisits the universal symbol of the pomegranate, whose stylized flower runs throughout her canvases, drawings, and watercolors.
Her interest in floral and cosmic themes can also be seen in three series titled Pivoines, Vanités, and Volutes.
Since 2005, Mehadji has been producing digital works that incorporate details from engraved plates by Goya.
Artist's texts
Beginnings
My early works, in the 1970s, were drawings that evoked diagrams of sound, the tone of a voice, for example. And on several occasions it led me to do performances where I amplified the sound of the marks I was making while I drew on paper - it was like breathing, a personal rhythm or inner voice, that was guiding me.
My work on canvas, at first, was a long quest for color, as well as a reflection on lines and traces, which is still the case today.
I didn’t use painting’s conventional materials and supports, but rather newsprint, silkscreen inks, raw canvas, size, and gesso. These limited and very modest resources gave me greater freedom.
Architecture
All the architecture constructs walls in space and plays on form and content, as when I draw a line that simultaneously reveals spaces on both sides, or a circular line that generates volume.
This explains the importance of the areas left “in reserve” in my work, which play a major role between the lines drawn in chalk, whether on paper or canvas.
Light plays an essential role in architecture because it has the capacity to transform volumes and relief (as seen in bas-reliefs on Egyptian temples or cathedral doors). The cupola (or dome) and capital are the main architectural features I work from; the former because it represents the celestial sphere, hence aspires to the spiritual, and the latter because of its many variations and metamorphoses of vegetation. I’ve always been drawn to designs of lines in space, to the relationship between volumes, structure and forms in nature and architecture, especially those that symbolize elements of the universe, such as pyramids, domes, capitals.
Drawing
Drawing lines is an expression of time (duration), a little like the growth rings on a tree; hand and mind are caught up in the rhythm required by the execution of the drawing; this rhythm reveals the stages of the drawing’s gestation in a movement toward expansion, distension, volume. It is crucial to my work, both on paper and canvas. My paintings are, in fact, large chalk drawings done in physically and mentally expressive gestures; they are fluid constructions that create a link between the cosmic and the human, the spiritual and the tangible.
Cupolas
The theme of the dome or cupola appeared in my work in 1993, at a time when I was particularly indignant over the crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia by the strategy of “ethnic cleansing” aimed at Bosnians who were Muslims, and the destruction of their cultural heritage. In my mind, Sarajevo was like the city of Grenada in Andalusia during its golden period in the middle ages, open and multicultural. So I wanted to work from certain domes, like the one on Alhambra, then on the universal nature of the domes where you often find an octagon that makes the transition from square to circle, from terrestrial to celestial. The dome is a kind of intermediary between humanity and the cosmos.
In-between
For the past twenty years I’ve divided my time between Paris and Essaouira, Morocco. Going back and forth from one country to another, one culture to another creates a distance that allows me to put things in perspective and to get to the essence of things faster, uninhibited by habits.
This nomadic period began with the works titled Icare (Icarus), done during a six-month stay in Morocco in 1985. They refer to the Greek myth of Icarus and the moment he flies up toward the light, with the sky as his territory. It continued with the Coupoles (Cupolas), metaphors for the transition from the earthbound to the heavenly, and with Ma–, which are like “sections of wall” that dangle in the void. Then came Arborescences and Grenades (Pomegranates), motifs that have crossed numerous civilizations from China to Andalusia, and more recently, the Suites Goyesques, digital works based on Goya’s engravings that were done in Madrid.
All these series hover somewhere between drawing and painting, abstraction and representation, color and light, inner and outer, movement and stasis, tangible and symbolic, gesture and idea, geometric and organic, form and flux, constraint and freedom, intuition and reflection, perception and memory—East and West.
