Nja Al Mahdaoui in Oratory Paradise - February 2009
By Talal Moualla- Artist and researcher in Arab Aesthetics
“Whatever the historical pasts of peoples, and regardless of their respective spiritual, moral, physical and cultural unities, the element that represents the true evolution of spirit is nothing but the decisive movement of a true artist. It is the keeper of the spirit of all of profound science and philosophies.” Nja Al Mahdaoui
Over the years I’ve known artist Nja Al Madaoui without having actually met him. I never expected to sit with him one day in a coffee shop at ‘Sidy Busai,’ while he pointed at an elegant house behind us and said in his usual lively fashion, “I was born here!”
The Mediterranean, with its enchanting azure mist, gave our warm conversation that day the chance to be a vessel of exchanging ideas on a whole range of creative issues, including his unique and highly distinguished experience.
I believe when examining what an artist has produced, one must always provide treatments and analyses based on contemporary knowledge, without presenting any conclusions or unqualified critical views. This is particularly the case if one combines the method and visual aspirations of Mahdaoui, of prevailing Arab concern, with calligraphic paintings which still require analysis and interpretation.
The calligraphic experience
There is no doubt that the experience of Tunisian artist Nja Al Mahdaoui is foundational at the Arab level, for what is sometimes termed Letter Art or art based on Arabic Calligraphy. I prefer to call them calligraphic paintings, which allows us to interpret them from various angles and in a much more accurate and elaborate manner than the excessively romanticized and muddled accounts of the past.
It is better to deal with this subject within the framework of its being and reality, without disregarding all that has been said aboout Mahdaoui’s experience. In fact the artist considers his experience to be a part of his unified visual dialogue, where poses the very questions he has been asking himself since the beginning.
The face of the conformist Arab versus the dominating West was a fundamental phase of his experience. As a pioneer of Arabic calligraphic art, he was one of the first to ask how we could break away from repetition and stagnancy in presenting certain concepts.
Artist Nja Al Mahdoui says: “My main issue in painting is first to seek innovation, the will to escape the maze of culture which compels us to submit to a specific type, style or technique. I had to begin intellectually and culturally dismantling the forms and influences of other schools, and then it was necessary that I started the stripping of the written form of the rules and cultural icons: letters, references, messages, words and symbols. The point is to overcome the source and separate the scientific writing from the visual act, from the pronounced authority of the declared and the undeclared. “
Mahdaoui has been reiterating these concepts since the mid-eighties, attempting to recapture what he feels he had lost; his own personal symbols and his uniqueness in the futuristic humanist context. If letters seem visible at the analytic and material levels in some of his works, a large part of his corpus does not incorporate them.
Either way, he endeavors to attain his distinctive vision, whether he employs precise geometry by bounding the visual dialogue in space, or resorts to a visual narrative that unfolds to a paradise of lyric. He submits to no statement, meaning or interpretation, relying on the value of the infinitely forming visual links, similar in style to a narrative.
If many calligraphic painters adopted a certain mode of connection, Mahdaoui remained away from such dogmas in his calligraphic allusions, as if language only resided in a system of chronological sequence, attempting to represent what was not represented, or what could not be represented.
The use of narrative
In A Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Arabi’s Passage through Tunisia and many other poetic or narrative texts portrayed by Mahdaoui, the event disappears and it is transformed into an exhibition bearing no relationship to representation. Thus the viewer cannot separate a single work from the entire body, because the whole is what bears the truth.
The desire for visual narration is evident in the representation of symbols emanating from imagination and reformulating space. The integration of filled and empty space creates pulses that lead the vision to movement. This is also the reason the artist has presented body art exhibitions that carry the essence of the pulses contained in his calligraphic paintings.
As to why the Arab feels connected to these works, or why the non-Arab sees in them defining characteristics, the answer is related to the narrative level in Mahdaoui’s experience. He paints with the astuteness of his physical and metaphysical views, joyfully reformulating them according to the creative rules of narration.
He thus derives his basic vocabulary from Arab knowledge and science, and enjoys transforming them every time into a visual narrative beyond predecessor and successor. This is exactly what engages his receiver or viewer, the visual subject as developed by the artist, who works on the visual tone.
This connection places Mahdaoui in the position of narrator and analyst of a visual language concerned with calligraphic painting and it is still a talking point in the Arab art scene.
The artist’s relationship with the letter
Lately, Mahdaoui has not been treating the letter as heritage, instead he has been looking at the context of vision, aimed at a consciousness behind the hidden potential of the letter. He spins the oral into a silence, charged with historical voyages- joining Andalusia, Baghdad and Damascus with Tunisia. His precise geometry joins with its visual explanations, his colors with their places of origin and the angle with his understanding of architecture.
In its entirety it provides a unified power of vision, calling for the receiving of the artwork in accordance with that diatomic moment. The moment the work is finished, a rhythm is generated by the graphic dynamism of writing and the musical insignia of the letters in a game of construction.
Upon any material whether paper, cloth, leather, fabric, dance or sculpture, the construction is in the symbols, betraying the letters and ignoring their value. That is why the artist cries: “In my special approach to calligraphy I constantly find myself destroying the very basis upon which this art form was created!”
Whether he is impersonating the letter, leaning on it, or destroying it, a strong bond gives his work something that brings to memory the power of life.
