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Khalil el Ghrib |
Khalil, never giving a title to any of his canvases. The series is therefore doors, domes, sketches of vertical tombs, bordered forms, all opening out on saturated in colour at variable degrees of intensity according to Khalil's own technique: the materiality of constituent parts including flour diluted in paste, gouache, fenugreek, fard «aaker» fassi, erotic rose. In addition, will the range take on the dimensions of a poem on the subject matter? Doors, domes, tombs? One hesitates to say; don't ask him to decide, he doesn't know in himself. Don't expect to find out; the only important thing is that the form speaks for itself in its seduction, in which it stimulates without reference to the real object. The form exhibits itself through colour and stroke. There is a truly prodigious speed of execution; the cadence of Khalil, gushingly fertile, setting up this way of seeing. This passage follows the original cadence, the vision - the revelation is held in the rupture, the discontinuity, the intervening period. The image meanwhile is fixed, stopped, in accordance with the usual way of viewing painting. It might risk allowing what is written in it escape. A paradox! The image must delete itself in order to have significance, in order to give way to the other? the one that remains invisible in its double and eventually deletes itself. Thus a spiralling motion is begun that is labyrinthic and in which the first condition is that the famous Ariane's thread is cut, a movement of revelation in which obscurity and opacity get thicker. Speech empties itself, dispossessing itself, continually capable of a new representation. «Would that not be the only speech that the mystical teaches us?», writes José Angel Valente with regard to The Spiritual Canticle by Saint John of the Cross. Edmond Amran EL MALEH (In L'oeil et la main, Ed. La pensée sauvage) When he is in Asilah, first thing in the morning Khalil walks through his town, where his soul is. His mother sea is there also, as are his shores where he begins his harvest; he is not looking for anything in particular which could be of use. Shiny stones rejected by the sea, a wire, cardboard, the detritus of materials found amongst ruins; chance is the grand purveyor. It is a quest - an exercise in meditation, movement and walking, with the body and soul engaged and in search of the unexpected, the unpredictable. At his home in Tangiers, lately he has been storing enormous quantities of used paper carton which he has had the fortune to buy when meeting people selling items on the streets of the town. Limestone, ultimately the quintessence of materials, is emblematic of this immemorial universe that Khalil has blended into in refusal of all identity. The limestone is the template, the source of creativity and a mother tongue which feeds on silence. The art, indeed the great art of Khalil is to liberate the subject matter, to allow it to manifest itself, interiorising it and damaging it by means of a kind of extraordinary asceticism. Edmond Amran EL MALEH bienal.depo.es bienal.depo.es Khalil El Ghrib (français) Khalil El Ghrib (english) Khalil El Ghrib (español)      |