Geometric Abstraction: From Malevich to Belkahia, a Parallel History

There is an irony in art history that textbooks tend to sidestep: at the moment Kazimir Malevich was exhibiting his Black Square in Petrograd in 1915 and proclaiming the advent of pure abstraction, craftsmen in Maghrebi medinas had been working for centuries on geometric compositions of comparable mathematical sophistication. The zellij of the Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fez, the lozenge-patterned Berber rugs of the Atlas, the coffered wooden ceilings of Moroccan-Andalusian houses: all of this constitutes a tradition of geometric abstraction that did not wait for European avant-gardes to exist.

Farid Belkahia was one of the first Moroccan artists to explicitly theorise this parallelism and make it an artistic programme. From the 1960s, at the École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca that he directed, he encouraged his students to look at craft not as a repertoire of forms to copy, but as the demonstration that abstract thinking is inherent to Arab-Berber visual culture. This is not a step backward — it is an affirmation of the modernity of these traditions, a refusal to let modernity be the monopoly of the West.

For my own practice, this double genealogy — the Maghrebi-Andalusian ornamental tradition and the developments of international abstraction in the 20th century — constitutes fertile ground. My works are not quotations: they reproduce neither a zellij motif nor a Suprematist composition. But they work in the space these two traditions have opened: the space of pure form, of colour as matter rather than representation, of surface as a site of spiritual and sensory concentration. Cellulosic paint, with its ability to create planes of colour that are simultaneously absolute and vibrant, allows me to inhabit that space in a contemporary way.

Geometric abstraction has seen a renewed international interest over the past decade. Major exhibitions like 'Patterns of Abstraction' at the British Museum, or the growing place given to artists from the Middle East and North Africa at fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze, testify to a growing recognition that the history of abstraction is plural — that it developed on several continents and in several cultural traditions simultaneously. For Moroccan artists, this opening is an opportunity: not to align with Western canons, but to assert the singularity and depth of a tradition that deserves to be read and understood on its own terms.

What I hope to bring, through my participation in international fairs and exhibitions in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, is precisely that reading. My works are Moroccan — they bear the imprint of the culture in which they were conceived, the training received from Mohamed Hamidi, the streets of Casablanca, the light of Morocco. But they also speak a universal language — that of form, light and matter that any viewer, wherever they are in the world, can receive directly. This double belonging is not a tension to resolve — it is the very condition of contemporary art that assumes its own complexity.

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