The Casablanca School: A Living Legacy in Moroccan Contemporary Art

When people ask where my work comes from, I always answer with a name: Casablanca. Not the postcard city, but Casablanca as the cradle of a quiet artistic revolution. The Casablanca School, driven in the 1960s and 1970s by Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi and Mohamed Hamidi, forged a radically new vision of what Moroccan art could be — an art rooted in the plastic forms of Arab-Berber culture, freed from Western mimicry, open to modernity without denying itself. This is the legacy I absorbed, first as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca under Mohamed Hamidi, then as an artist building his own language.

The Casablanca School was not a mere stylistic movement. It was an intellectual and political stance. Belkahia and his companions refused the idea that contemporary Moroccan art should mirror Parisian or New York avant-gardes. They looked elsewhere: at Berber rugs, zellij tilework, henna tattoos, the ornaments of medina doors. They saw in these forms a living geometry, an abstraction that the West had taken decades to theorise, but which had existed for centuries in Maghrebi craft. This rereading of heritage as a plastic resource — rather than folklore — remains for me a foundational lesson.

To study under Mohamed Hamidi was to make direct contact with this genealogy. Hamidi did not teach technique: he transmitted an ethics of seeing. He taught us to read calligraphy not as writing but as architecture, to interpret the light on a painted surface as one would read a poem. This training gave me the tools to approach cellulosic paint on aluminium or canvas not as a formal exercise, but as an act of memory and transformation. Each layer I apply is in dialogue with those teachings: the rigour of composition, the purity of form, the tension between fullness and void.

The influence of the Casablanca School on Moroccan contemporary art remains deep, even if it is sometimes invisible at first glance. It operates like an underlying grammar: one does not see it, but one recognises it in the way Moroccan artists today handle surface, space, colour. In my work, this legacy manifests in my relationship with geometric abstraction, in the way I build pieces that refuse narrative and privilege pure sensation. Works exhibited at 1-54 London, Abu Dhabi Art Fair and Paris Internationale all carry this imprint, even when they appear formally distant from it.

Today, as collections at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat and the Bank Al-Maghrib Museum preserve Moroccan works tracing this historical continuity, I feel invested with a particular responsibility. Not to let this heritage solidify into a monument, but to keep it in tension with the present. The Casablanca School was alive because it questioned. My work aspires to be faithful to that spirit: not to repeat the masters' forms, but to extend their gesture of freedom — searching in matter, cellulosic, luminous, vibrant, for the answers our era demands.

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