The Amazigh heritage with the fingerprint of an artist: a reading of the creative achievement of the Moroccan plastic artist “Hassan Asalih”
In a beautiful town with its terrain, its diverse vegetation, and its roses, for which a festival is held to celebrate it annually in the southeast of Morocco. Here, the artist Mohamed Asaleh grew up embracing nature and the beautiful surroundings to express his magnificence and splendor through paintings close to the heritage and open to beauty, inspired by him through visual coexistence that combines the present and the past. In the "Castle of Roses".
In this village, many self-made creators grew up attached to their ancient Amazigh heritage.
Muhammad Asaleh is among those who entered fine art with real talent, which made him refine it through communication with the creators and their works, which eventually made him adopt his own style of planning and coloring.
Architecture is one of the vocabulary of his paintings
In his paintings, Berber reeds are clothed with their striking beauty, surrounded by a nature whose aesthetics are in harmony with the aesthetics of architecture with its towers and terracotta colors.
Although the artist usually tries to simulate what he sees in reality and the surroundings, he is bound by additions that give the artwork what makes it creative and qualitative, and this is what we find in most of the works of this artist who used many techniques and experimented with different colors, perspectives and dimensions.
And so that life accompanies his architectural drawings, the artist draws people on the way to it or in its vastness, practicing their daily work in its bosom, indicating that it does not stop living in a world that has crawled over houses in different forms that depend on cement and iron instead of mud and stones.
Portraits of women in his paintings
Portrait is considered one of the most difficult arts, as it requires the ability to draw faces and their features that reflect their various expressions, and the most difficult thing is that the portrait comes in black and white and the required gradations of color and work on the closeness and spacing between light and shadow on the portrait space.
The artist was interested in portraiture, so he showed in his works many female faces and part of her clothes and jewelry, an indication of the aesthetic that characterizes the Amazigh heritage data, and in order to reflect a past heritage, he presents them in black and white and with backgrounds that refer to the surroundings to which these portraits belong.
It is noticeable that the artist paid attention to the portrait of women, given that women are more conservative of the cultural heritage, as they adhere to their jewelry and the type of clothing inherited from their ancestors, which carries their identity and the type of their creativity that frames their culture and view of existence. So, “if the art of portraiture was limited to documenting the figure of the person depicted, it would have settled at the bottom alongside the silent nature. But it is an art in which the expression of the status, importance, interests and character of the person depicted is included, up to his psychological state, even if that is at the expense of accurate resemblance, and this requires great ingenuity and remarkable mental effort. Portrait is radically different from the quick and spontaneous “snapshot” that represents a person’s face, whether it is a hand drawing or a photographic snapshot. In the portrait, this person is in a fixed and studied position, under a studied light as well, and the artist has the right to decide the general composition and whether he will paint it surrounded by things such as furnishings or nature, or against an empty background and so on.” 1.
Objects of heritage in his paintings
In his paintings, the artist finds interest in everything that bears the features of the place in which he lives, such as craftsmen, water-carriers, farmers, and furniture... These are matters that many creative people in the area he lives in care about, and every artist has his mark in this field.
Muhammad Asaleh is a young creator, who showed his talent and love for fine art, which made him constantly present in the creative field in the region in which he grew up and outside it, devoting his energies and diligence in order to establish an experience that adds to the experiences of others, enriching art as a universal language that reflects our heritage, our feelings and our attitude towards life.
Signal
I think that the artist, like many other creators in the southeast of Morocco, tends the same direction with slight differences when it comes to Amazigh architecture at a time when many combinations that he shows in a creative and qualitative plasticity should be tried, far from similarity in experiences. The paintings of Omar Ait Said, Ibrahim Bouzir, Abdel Salam Bouziane, Mohamed Ben Hamou and others... bear the same approach and the same theme, with a slight difference between one creator and another, at a time when experimentation and adventure should be practiced in creative compositions across various schools of art, which makes him able to download them as messages that refer to The importance of preserving it as part of the heritage that should remain immortal, leading to renewal and development in order to preserve the continuity of the thread of heritage on which our identity is built.
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1-The Caravan Magazine, Ahmed Bazon and the Caravan Team, Portrait Art, dated July - August 2020 AD.
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