Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Arts School

The French colonial presence in Morocco grew steadily throughout the 19th century. The nation was given French protectorate status in 1912. The following ten years saw the founding of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco's capital. It adopted the teaching methods of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where lessons frequently involved easel painting and working from statues or life models.

Morocco's nationalist movement grew after World War II and reached its zenith with its separation from France in 1956.‘Artistic change took longer to happen, though, than political change,’ says Montazami. ‘Colonialism doesn’t stop affecting a culture the minute a country is independent. It lasts until such a time as a local ecosystem incubates and emerges to subvert it.’

When Farid Belkahia was appointed as the director of the Casablanca Art School, the incubation process got under way in 1962. The teachings of the group of artist-professors including Mohamed Melehi and Mohammed Chabâa, all of whom were in their mid-twenties, assisted in bringing in a new generation of progressive practice.

Since the 1960s, artists and activists of the Casablanca Art School called for a return to African and Berber sources. Together they encouraged their students to study rugs, jewellery, leatherwork, tattoos, “decorative” painting in mosque and zawiyas (religious schools or monasteries) of the Souss region; to seek the potential of these popular Moroccan art forms in terms of geometric abstraction and “modernism”. A multicultural repertoire of forms and symbols with complex interconnections between Berber and African, Islamic and Mediterranean, as well as the deeper archaeological layers of Mesopotamia and Phoenicia. While Mohamed Melehi was fully involved in the development of mural paintings and urban design in the context of the Asilah Arts Festival, his works from the 1980s seem to open a new space for reframing the wave (either through craft objects or architecture).

During his time teaching as a professor of painting, Melehi pushed his students to reimagine the geometric designs found in ancient Berber carpets and Islamic ornaments. He preferred using wood as a foundation rather than canvas, and he oversaw the creation of numerous murals.

The wave was expanded and turned into a structural thread for the reintegration of decorative arts and everyday aspirations into his avant-garde project. He had chosen, for his 1965 Galerie Bab Rouah exhibition in Rabat, to display a Berber carpet (from the private collection of Bert Flint) next to his soft and angular paintings. From that time to the 1980s, Melehi’s works continued to maintain the flow of new waves as synonymous to “new craft” and to a certain aesthetic fluidity.

In parallel to these experiments, Belkahia, Chabâa and Melehi created in situ reliefs, frescoes and furniture design – in an “integrated art” style that was both minimalist and grassroots. Commissioned by architectural studio Faraoui & De Mazières, these structural and decorative elements demonstrate a timely dialogue between the labyrinthine patterns of these works and the modular shapes of buildings designed by Patrice de Mazières. It is a rare example of visual artists and architects from Arab regions (one might mention the Baghdad Modern Art Group in the 1950-1960s) coming together as an innovative and hybrid group to imagine a future called “postcolonial architecture”.