M’Hamed Belkahia, Farid’s father, first owned a prosperous perfume business before becoming a civil servant at Civil Control. He was one of the first French speakers and Francophiles of his generation and as such accompanied the official delegation of interpreters during the inauguration of the Paris Mosque in 1926.
Il est fortement lié aux peintres Antoine et surtout Olek Teslar (avec lequel il fait un pacte de fraternité), et Jeannine Teslar, avec lesquels il rencontre Nicolas de Staël. C’est là que naît l’union de Jeannine avec de Staël qui se marieront par la suite.
M’Hamed Belkahia épouse Zhor Belcaïd.
The artist
ONE MAN, ONE WORK
From the quest for oneself and one's origins to the quest for the world, Farid Belkahia attempts to interpret a être-au-monde particular; question being in its relationship to time and memory. A time not only of history and culture but, well beyond, a time open to infinity, a time of eternity where being, approached in its historical, political and social dimension, will little by little become the place of an increasingly essential questioning which will tend towards an increasingly universal acceptance and apprehension. An approach which will force Farid Belkahia to summon the primordial forms very early on: the circle, the triangle, the square, the point, the cross and the arrow. These forms, treated for themselves, in their geometric dimension, will give rise, throughout its journey, to a symbolic emergence, defining being in its absoluteness and universality, outside of any impact of civilization. “Being, in its primary truth, is the same, whatever the heavens that shelter it,” he tells us. The being will then be, from his expressionist period, spanning from 1950 to 1965, not hunted down but approached, surrounded, almost asked to externalize his pain. Once placed at the center of its approach and its questioning, the being will then be signified by its “discomfort in civilization” and its way of being not yet in the world but in society and politics.
RAJAE BENCHEMSI
1933
1934
Birth in Marrakech of Farid Belkahia to M’Hamed Belkahia and Zhor Belcaïd.
1936
Family settlement in Amizmiz, then in Oulmès, where he spent part of his childhood and where his love of nature and an increased observation of insects and even reptiles were born.
1939
Family settlement in Azemmour, where he attended primary school.
1945
He entered the French College boarding school in al-Jadida where he met Abdallah Laroui who would become a great historian. With a passion for athletics and particularly running, he decided to pursue a sporting career.
1950
He did his first apprenticeship as a painter in the workshop of Olek Teslar in the company of the painter Moulay Ahmed Drissi. It is from this period that the Calligraphie, la seule de sa période expressionniste, et son Autoportrait à la cire.
1952
Farid Belkahia tells his father that he wants to become a painter. Faced with his firm refusal, which doomed him to study agricultural engineering, he left the family home definitively without taking the baccalaureate exam.
1953
The administration of Lycée Mangin finds Farid Belkahia a teaching position in Ouarzazate. He taught there for a year and met Charlie Chaplin in the town's only restaurant, but did not dare approach him. Decades later he acquired a work by Farid Belkahia.
He participated in the 5th Winter Salon of Morocco with three oil paintings: Nude, The Snake Charmer, Abstraction.
1954
He executed a series of committed, dark and sad paintings, where he expressed the feeling of violence experienced during the kidnapping of Mohammad V, including The Widow and the Children or Mohammad V in the Moon.
His first exhibition took place at the Hôtel de la Mamounia, which he passed on his way back from high school and where he watched Churchill who sometimes sat there to paint the Atlas.
1955
He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris but was put off by classicism and the standardization of teaching methods. He then joined Raymond Legueult's workshop, which he did not leave until 1959, and who agreed to follow his work with greater freedom and flexibility.
Always very sporty, he was invited to participate in the International World Youth Festival in Warsaw, where he would make his first exhibition. He ran with Emil Zatopek, with whom he became friends during his stay in Prague and to whom he paid tribute in a work made of skin in 1979. He visited the Auschwitz camp.
1956
Independence of Morocco. Belkahia is part of the delegation of Moroccan students who will greet Sultan Muhammad V at the Pavillon Henri IV in Saint-Germain-en Laye, and witnesses the historic allegiance of Glaoui.
He participated in the VIII Winter Salon of Morocco in Marrakech, at the Pavillon Jean du Pac in the Jnane el Harti, with three oil paintings: The Macabre World, The Two Condemned, The Suffering.
1958
A decisive turning point in identity, he made a long journey to the Middle East.
He sold all his belongings and went to Venice, where he boarded the Michelangelo”, which inaugurated his first voyage to the Orient, to go, he told us, “in search of my cultural origins.
He visited Egypt and, fascinated by Pharaonic culture, produced a series of drawings, entitled Egypt interpreted by Farid Belkahia.
He then went to Baghdad where he met the poet al-Bayati, and from there decided to visit Jerusalem, a city to which he devoted numerous works. There he met a Christian father who was in Morocco and at his invitation spent his stay at the Church of the Nativity and made with him the pilgrimage of the Stations of the Cross, visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Wailing Wall.
1959
Belkahia decides to leave Paris for Prague. He enrolled at the Prague Theater Academy and took scenography courses there for three years. There he meets the great puppeteer Jin Trnka and reconnects with Zatopeck. He met Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, Pablo Neruda, and Ravy Shankar.
He participated in the X' Salon d'Hiver du Maroc in Marrakech with five oil paintings: Le Malade, Au bord du Jourdain, Le Cul-de-jatte, Boutique à Jerusalem, Maternity, with a text by Jean Orieux for the catalog.
1960
He created a huge fresco Sevices, in homage to prisoners in French prisons in Algeria. As well as La Chinoise.
1961
Following an experience where he got lost in a forest in the Tatar mountains, he created The Forest, the premise of a long study on trees.
He took a stand against the “Bay of Pigs” and painted Cuba.
He married, in his first marriage, Aléna Novotna.
1962
In homage to Edvard Munch's The Scream and to take a stand against the pressure of the communist government, he painted The Wac-wac Scream, where a hand appears for the first time; the mouth, caught in the terrible grin of the cry, is gripped by two hands, those of the artist himself, placed on the paper. Cry, of distress and alert, amplified by a call for help, wac-wac, expressed in the vernacular term of Morocco. At the invitation of Mahjoub Benseddik, he accepted the direction of the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca.
He meets Doctor Marcel-Yves Poirot and his wife Marie-Antoinette Catanzaro, who become his second family. It was with them that he became friends with people from the entertainment industry such as Pierre Brasseur, Catherine Sauvage, Betty Mars, Jacques Brel and Mario Ruspoli.
1963
In homage to Edvard Munch's The Scream and to take a stand against the pressure of the communist government, he painted The Wac-wac Scream, where a hand appears for the first time; the mouth, caught in the terrible grin of the cry, is gripped by two hands, those of the artist himself, placed on the paper. Cry, of distress and alert, amplified by a call for help, wac-wac, expressed in the vernacular term of Morocco. At the invitation of Mahjoub Benseddik, he accepted the direction of the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca.
He meets Doctor Marcel-Yves Poirot and his wife Marie-Antoinette Catanzaro, who become his second family. It was with them that he became friends with people from the entertainment industry such as Pierre Brasseur, Catherine Sauvage, Betty Mars, Jacques Brel and Mario Ruspoli.
1964
He visits Senegal, Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Niger, Nigeria and Mali. As part of the Terres des hommes international festival in Montreal, he is the setting for a popular art show, IzIane. At the request of the theater director, Marlène Dietrich will sing in the middle of this setting.
1965
He left for a year in Milan where he took courses at the Accademia di Brera.
He lives in Sesto San Giovani where a capitalist decides to challenge the communists of the time and builds economic housing for workers, and reserves an entire plan of his buildings for artists. He opened a canteen on the ground floor and inaugurated a practice of bartering which allowed many artists in financial difficulty, including Belkahia, to lodge and eat in exchange for drawings and paintings. He became a collector and, years later, Belkahia brought together all the painters of this period in Milan, all happy to find and see their works again.
It was during this stay in Italy that Bekahia became friends with the painters Castellani, Kounellis, Bonalumi and Fontana.
1966
First exhibition of copper works; people are dismayed and experience this as an affront. He participated in the founding of the magazine Souffles.
1968
He is going on a long journey; he first visited Ghana, then the United States with his friend Tayyeb Seddiqi, a great man of the theater.
1969
He is organizing a first experience of art in the street with an exhibition on Place Jamaa al-Fna in Marrakech, which is a landmark in the history of contemporary painting in Morocco. He visited Peru and made drawings on Machu Picchu, then Mexico where he was impressed by the patriotism of the galleries regarding their relationship with Mexican painters. He is also fascinated by the similarities he encounters between the Inca culture and that of the Berbers of the Middle Atlas in Morocco. He spent vacations with César and attended the first constructions in Cabo Negro of his friend Frédéric Chauvelot, former aide-de-camp of General Charles de Gaulle, passionate about architecture.
1970
Always with the aim of offering an international experience to students of the Casablanca School of Fine Arts, he invites artists such as Dimitrienko, César and Lurçat.
1972
Guest of the State Department in the United States for six months, he visited numerous art institutions and was impressed by MIT.
1973
Under the pressure put on him by the Municipality of Casablanca, to which the School of Fine Arts depends, he began to think about submitting his resignation. He participates in the exhibition Maghreb Painters in Algiers. He left Oulad Haddou's workshop and moved into an apartment of colonial architecture, at 103 Boulevard de la Résistance in Casablanca.
1974
For increasingly harsh political reasons, he resigned from the direction of the Casablanca School of Fine Arts. “I felt like I was in mourning – he told us – but free. »
He left for Portugal where, during the Ceilet Revolutions, he rented a workshop and practiced the technique of engraving with his friend, the painter and engraver, David de Almeida. Strangely, he immediately interrupted his copper experiment after his resignation and exhibited, for the first time, his new work at the Structure BS Gallery in Rabat. A true break with art in its Western tradition, this exhibition meets only consternation and disappointment. He will not sell any work.
He enters a period of great financial difficulty, but not only does not give in, but, internally, he decides to make them pay for it; decades later, when collectors wanted to acquire coppers, he opposed it by saying: "Let them think a little about the lean period that they put me through! Now I no longer need two. »
1975
Second major turning point in his journey: he locks himself away again to explore a new material, skin.
1976
The Association of Painters is organizing a traveling exhibition in Rabat, Fez and Meknes. With other painters who had participated in the Arab Biennale in Baghdad, Palestine not being able to host the Arab Biennale on its territory, Moroccan artists decided to host this event for and on behalf of Palestine. A few weeks before the exhibition, the Ministry of Culture took over the project. Farid Belkahia, offended by such attitudes, refuses to participate and withdraws his works.
1977
He spent three months in the Caribbean, the Grenadine Islands, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti and observed trance at length in the tradition of voodoo.
1978
Invited for the Seoul Olympic Games, he created a large sculpture for the exhibition center. He traveled inside Korea with a Korean theater troupe and met many “living treasures,” including puppeteers and Buddhist temple painters.
Creation of the Moussem of Assilah. With Muhammad Benaïssa and Muhammad Mélihi, they decided to found a festival, the Moussem of Assilah, convinced that art and culture could be at the origin of the rehabilitation of a medieval town, which had become poor and unsanitary. A first operation will be a landmark in Morocco where the city offers its walls to painters. Belkahia will paint a wall there in collaboration with local children.
Having become a cultural institution, the festival quickly acquired a cultural center with a large exhibition hall where all the great Moroccan and Arab painters, but also Spanish and other painters, such as Fromanger, Corneille or David de Almeida, will be exhibited, and from an engraving workshop run by Omar Khalil.
Belkahia will organize a sort of festival privately, in a house that he acquires very early on. He will receive, in particular, Farid Sabry, the great singer of Kawali, the group Nas al Ghiwane, the great Iraqi flutist Mounir Bachir. It is also there that he will organize numerous gnawa evenings with master Sam, one of the most important in Morocco.
1979
The Prime Minister, Karim El-Amrani, then CEO of the Cherifian Phosphate Office, had one of the first large buildings of resolutely modern architecture built and invited Belkahia to design specific work for this immense space. He called on many painters including Mélihi, Slaoui, Meghara, Miloud, Miloudi, El-Hamidi, Chatia, among others.
In addition to numerous works, he created a 36 m2 skin fresco and tapestries where for the first time he mixed wool and copper.
Today it is one of the largest collections of contemporary art in Morocco.
1980
Fascinated by a tree on almost desert land in the Palmeraie of Marrakech, a centuries-old Atlas pistachio tree, he decided to acquire this land and asked his friend, the architect Abderrahim Sijelmassi, to build him a house in earth.
At the same time, he met the great Egyptian architect Hassan Fathi, to whom he shared his project and who encouraged him.
1981
He began a long study on Malhun, courtly and medieval poetry from Morocco, a series conceived in three sets of seven paintings divided into bsat: both musical maqam and space for the deployment of amorous passion. All rectangular, their internal and external structure echoes the narrative requirement which takes place in “stances”. The forms, sensual and lyrical, are subject to a movement of fascination, in search of the original loving unity.
For the first time, Moroccan artists are invited to an ice sculpture competition in Canada. With Hassan Slaoui they participated and won first prize with a work called Métamorphose.
1984
He works at the Assilah engraving workshop.
1985
Exhibition Twenty-five years of drawings at the Alif Ba Gallery in Casablanca, directed by the painter Tallai, son of Chaïbia who, at the same period, created a portrait of Farid Belkahia with whom she is very close.
1986
At the invitation of Jean-Louis Larguier, he exhibited at the Maison des Cultures in Le Havre, where he met Raoul Ruiz who decided to make a film about him.
1987
Raoul Ruiz directs the film Paya et Tala, a visit to Farid Belkahia, in his house in Marrakech, already built but not yet inhabited.
1988
He participated in the Moroccan Contemporary Painting exhibition in Brussels, Ostend and Liège and there met Jean-Pierre Vantighem who wrote a text about him.
1989
He decides to live in Bally and goes there to prepare for his installation, but a few months later he meets Rajae Benchemsi and gives up on this project.
1990
He married Rajae Benchemsi for the second time and settled in his property in Marrakech, where he built a huge workshop.
1991
He participated in the exhibition Four Painters from Morocco, at the initiative of Brahim Alaoui, then artistic director of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. He plays in the film Sacred Night, based on the novel by Tahar Ben Jelloun.
1992
He participates in an exhibition dedicated to drawing at the Galerie al Manar in Casablanca.
1993
Birth on April 14 of his daughter Fanou, named after an Almoravid warrior princess.
He participates in the exhibition Painters of the Maghreb in different museums in Spain.
1994
Appointed curator for the African Encounters exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, he made numerous trips to Africa to choose artists from black Africa, particularly Kenya and Ethiopia.
At the invitation of Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres, within the framework of the peace agreements, he was part of the delegation of Arab artists and writers, including Tayyeb Saddiqi and Abdelkrim Khatibi, for the trip to Israel.
He participates in the African Encounters exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
1995
Exhibition at the Darat al-Funun Foundation in Amman, where the Iraqi painter Shaker Hassan traveled from Baghdad, then at war, with a whole group of students from the School of Fine Arts to see the exhibition and meet Belkahia who will tell them about his experiences in Iraq.
He represents the Arab world at the exhibition organized on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations in Geneva, where he exhibits a series of four triangles on the theme The dignity of man and not human rights. There he met the Indian artist Jo Ben and received President Jacques Chirac at his pavilion.
Exhibition at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool where he forced the curator, Judith Nesbit, to paint the exhibition room black for the needs of the work.
1996
He begins a new study on Malhun.
1997
He lost a daughter at birth and created a large circular skin in her memory, The Blue Angel.
At the invitation of Adelina von Fürstenberg, he participated in the exhibition Meditations at the Medersa Ben Yussuf in Marrakech with notably the painters Rosenberg, Sol LeWitt, Anish Kapoor, as well as numerous poets. Contemporary art has never been so close to architecture and Islamic arts.
1998
He participates in the African Artists exhibition at the Tobu Museum in Tokyo, the Mediterranea exhibition at the City Hall Museum in Brussels and the Autour du football exhibition at the Enrico Navarra Gallery in Paris.
1999
Exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, then under the direction of Gilbert Perlein.
Exhibition at the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in Paris, then under the direction of Jean-Hubert Martin who agreed to paint one of the exhibition rooms black.
He participates in the exhibition Modernities and Memories. Muslim painters, in Istanbul.
He is carrying out a new study on Malhun.
2000
He participates in the Lyon Biennale at the invitation of its curator, Jean-Hubert Martin.
2001
Exhibition at the Marrakech Museum, in Islamic architecture.
2002
He attended the Diwan al Adab literary salon of Jaafar Kensoussi in Marrakech and met Ahmed Tawfik, Minister of Islamic Affairs, Chawqi Binebine, general curator of the Royal Library of Rabat, Abdelilah Benarafa, writer, Abdelali Elamrani Jamal, philosopher, Hamid Triki, historian, and men of tradition such as the theologian Abdellatif Tebaa or the writer Ahmed al Kholassa. With them, he discovered an intellectual universe that he had never known, where it was always about Arab and Islamic thought and in particular Sufism.
2005
Continental Drift exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris; the exhibition, which takes place in completely black rooms, is a tribute to the 11th century Arab geographer Sharîf al-ldrîsî, and a political position on the violence that man exercises on the earth and on certain ravaged countries by colonization.
2006
Exhibition at the Bab Rwah Gallery in Rabat.
2007
He is participating in an exhibition at the British Museum in London. Exhibition at the Galerie Le Violon Bleu in Tunis.
2008
Exhibition at the Matisse Art Gallery in Marrakech. Exhibition of drawings at Dar Cherifa in Marrakech, in 15th century medieval architecture. century. He participates in the Morocco exhibition at the Armando Alvarès Penteado Foundation in Sào Paulo, Brazil. Marrakech Biennale. He participates in an exhibition at the Lentos Museum in Linz, Austria.
2009
He creates numerous sculpture models in Corten steel.
2010
Exhibition at the Venise Cadre Gallery in Casablanca.
2011
Exhibition of brass instruments, which he has not exhibited for more than twenty years, at the Galerie Delacroix in Tangier.
On the occasion of the inauguration of the Mathaf Museum of Contemporary Art in Qatar, a room was reserved for him and for this he created the sculpture The Doors of Infinity.
2012
He participates in the Drawings exhibition at Galerie 21 in Casablanca.
2013
Exhibition L’Atelier by Farid Belkahia, with scenography by Michel Delis, at Galerie 21 in Casablanca.
2014
Farid Belkahia died in Marrakech on September 25, 2014
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