The Moroccan artist, Mohamed Melehi, who passed away a few weeks ago in the French capital Paris, is one of the most prominent artistic faces that established the path of plastic art inside Morocco, along with Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Shabaa and Ahmed Cherkaoui, each of whom worked in his own way to invoke a Moroccan plastic art form free from its grip Western model.

Al-Melehi's study in Western institutes enabled him to stand at the most difficult moments of the Arab-Islamic civilization, and thus produced an art comparable to Western art in its aesthetics and intellectual horizons, so that Al-Melehi's return to Morocco and his work in the School of Fine Arts in the city of Casablanca, along with Farid Belahia, had an impact Great for entire generations.

For the first time in the history of Moroccan formation, the Moroccan heritage was wagered as a locomotive towards a plastic modernity, starting from Moroccan roots and meeting in its historical, aesthetic and artistic dimensions with Arab civilization through various models of Islamic art through miniatures, engraved writings and Islamic architecture.

The works of Muhammad al-Melehi remained to a great extent more expressive of symbolic memory and its childish paths (agencies)

At a time when Farid Belkahia resorted to local materials such as gypsum, henna, saffron and copper in order to renew his artistic language and bring it closer to a handicraft at the level of materials, molds and bonds, Muhammad al-Melehi wagered on the intertwining wavy geometric lines, which find their intellectual momentum within the Arab-Islamic civilization and its spirit.

Melehi played a major role within the Casablanca community in the methods of questions of identity, originality and contemporary, and in modernizing the Moroccan visual heritage and making it a gateway to transcend artistic concepts that had exhausted their ability to influence the imagined and present Moroccan formation and its new concepts at the time of the seventies, which were elaborated by the Casablanca group with Melehi, Balkahia and others through Returning to heritage and making it a basic base upon which to base a formative act obsessed with issues of heritage and identity, but through complex dimensions that do not restrict themselves within this identity, which became intertwined with the heritage of others in the era of globalization.

Therefore, the interest in the concept of identity among the Casablanca community did not come arbitrarily within art, as it came as a result of an intellectual debate that affected contemporary Arab thought in some eastern capitals, carried by the winds of modernity to Morocco, and further crystallized within the magazine "Anfas" (run by the writer and writer Abdel-Latif Al-Laabi) In order to prepare a new generation interested in "Moroccanizing" the Moroccan visual heritage and making it at the center of its artistic works, instead of focusing on Western artistic currents and schools.

Muhammad al-Melehi's concept of heritage takes a procedural concept in making it sometimes just an expressive means, which distinguishes the painting from its counterparts within other experiences.

Heritage, in this case, relegates to the status of a presence that has a function of belonging to a specific civilization, and sometimes it takes an entity dimension that includes the painting and sweeps with it all artistic elements through geometric shapes and color combinations and their diversity on the body of the painting.

For Mohammed Al-Melehi, the latter becomes a joyful homeland, which looks to him like a child whenever the path of his reality becomes narrow.

That is why the viewer of his various works since the 1960s hardly finds some features of Arab civilization in its clear geometric forms, as it makes it brew in the depth of the painting, not to float to its surface so that his work is not considered a recycling of Islamic works of art par excellence.

Thus Al-Melehi made his works draw on the depth of Arab civilization, but not on the basis of a historical or ideological context during the 1960s.

It is true that Muhammad al-Melehi was a major party in the debate on the renewal of artistic heritage within the magazine "Anfas", but he did not let this debate take an ideological mark, as it was the artistic excommunication that made Al-Melehi continue to knock on the door of plastic modernity based on the heritage, renewing his artistic language and aesthetic expressions And his intellectual stance towards a number of issues of originality, identity, modernity and post-modernity within the Moroccan formation.

An exhibition of the works of Moroccan plastic artist Mohamed Melehi (French)

The magic of memory

From another perspective, the works of Muhammad al-Melehi remained to a great extent more expressive of the symbolic memory and its childish paths, and it is important to capture the inevitable small details of the life and times of the city, making it ride the biography of the visible, and it is magically identical with the movement of the waves of the sea of ​​the original city, which Al-Melehi's paintings are almost inhabited obsessively and in eternal form.

Al-Melehi borrowed the rhythm of the waves early to weave a special and emotional relationship with his distant childhood in Asilah, he is an artist who sews existence into a painting, and makes him escape from the paths of his memory through the rhythm of the waves and his movements within the tides, and he makes this existential movement occupies the surface of the painting through the shapes and colors open in its hierarchy, And the wandering in her eyesight and the remote in the ways that form it, from any blindness that does not see color except as a component of the painting.

For Al-Melehi, the color becomes an orphan light coming from the soul of the soul, illuminating the artist's being and the darkness of his memory, and making it moan as it evokes the worlds of a city whose freshness did not hide in the face of time, nor in the eyes of international artists who stood at the threshold of its history that sticks to oblivion and the image of its ancient heritage. .

How, then, can the city disappear from the life of an artist like Muhammad al-Melehi, who borrowed from it the spaciousness of color and the charm of the blue wave, practicing since his childhood magic on the world?