Amazigh heritage with the imprint of an artist: a reading of the creative achievement of the Moroccan artist “Hassan Assalah”
In a beautiful town with its terrain, its varied vegetation, and its flowers, for which a festival is held to celebrate it annually in the south-east of Morocco, here the artist Mohamed Asalah grew up to embrace nature and the beautiful surroundings to express its splendor and splendor through paintings that are close to heritage and open to beauty, inspired by it through visual coexistence that combines the present and the past. In “Castle of Roses”.
In this village, many creative people grew up as self-made people, attached to their ancient Amazigh heritage.
Muhammad Asalah is among those who entered fine art with a true talent, which he refined through communication with creators and their works, which ultimately made him adopt his own style of planning and coloring.
Architecture is one of the vocabulary of his paintings
In his paintings, Berber kasbahs are dressed in their breathtaking beauty, surrounded by nature whose beauty is in harmony with the aesthetics of architecture with its towers and clay colours.
Although the artist usually tries to simulate what he sees in reality and the surroundings, he is obligated to add additions that give the artistic work what makes it creative and qualitative, which is what we find in most of the works of this artist, who used many techniques and experimented with different types of colors, perspectives, and dimensions.
And so that life accompanies his architectural drawings, the artist draws people on the way to it or within its expanses carrying out their daily work in its embrace, indicating that it does not cease from life in a world crawling with houses of various shapes that rely on cement and iron instead of clay and stones.
Women's portraits in his paintings
Portraiture is considered one of the most difficult arts, as it requires the ability to draw faces and their features that reflect their various expressions. The most difficult thing is for portraits to be done in black and white, as this requires of color gradations and working on juxtapositions and spacing between light and shadow over the portrait space.
The artist was interested in portraiture, and in his works he showed many female faces and some of their clothes and ornaments, an indication of the aesthetic that characterizes the Amazigh heritage data. In order to reflect a past heritage, he presents them in black and white and with backgrounds that refer to the environment to which the subjects of these portraits belong.
It is noted that the artist paid attention to the portrait of women, considering that women are more conservative of cultural heritage, as they adhere to their jewelry and the type of clothing inherited from their ancestors, which carries their identity and type of creativity that frames their culture and view of existence. “If the art of portraiture were limited to documenting the form of the person depicted, it would settle at the bottom alongside silent nature. But it is an art that involves expressing the status, importance, interests, and character of the person drawn, all the way to his psychological state, even if that is at the expense of the accuracy of the resemblance, and this requires great ingenuity and remarkable mental effort. Portrait is radically different from a quick, spontaneous “snapshot” of someone’s face, whether it is a hand drawing or a photograph. In the portrait, this person is in a fixed and studied position, under a studied light as well, and the artist can decide the general composition and whether he will draw him surrounded by things such as furnishings or nature, or against an empty background, etc. 1.
Heritage objects in his paintings
In his paintings, the artist finds interest in everything that bears the characteristics of the place in which he lives, such as craftsmen, such as watermen, farmers, and furniture... These are matters that many creative people in the region in which he lives are interested in, and each artist has his mark in this field.
Muhammad Asalah, a young creative man, demonstrated 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, harnessing his energies and diligence in order to establish an experience that brings Aux expériences des autres, enrichissant l'art en tant que langage universel qui reflète notre héritage, nos sentiments et notre attitude envers la vie.
Signal
Je pense que l'artiste, comme beaucoup d'autres créateurs du sud-est marocain, penche dans la même direction avec de légères différences en ce qui concerne l'architecture amazighe, à une époque où bon nombre des compositions qu'il expose devraient être expérimentées dans une forme qualitative et créative, loin de la similitude des expériences. Les peintures d'Omar Ait Saeed, Ibrahim Bouzier, Abdel Salam Bouziane, Mohamed Ben Hammou, et d'autres... portent la même tendance et le même trait, avec une légère différence entre un créateur et un autre, à une époque où l'expérimentation et l'aventure doivent être pratiqué dans des compositions créatives à travers diverses écoles artistiques, ce qui les rend capables de véhiculer des messages qui véhiculent... L'importance de le preserver As it is a heritage that must remain eternal and lead to renewal and development in order to preserve the continuation of the thread of heritage on which our identity is built.
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1 - Al-Qafila Magazine, Ahmed Bazoun and the Al-Qafila Team, Portrait Art, dated July-August 2020 AD.
Lahcen Malwani - Moroccan writer and artist