Category: Texts

On the white of the large studio’s walls the water-green shade of a clear palette dominates. Through the freshness of the recent paintings, I discover a collection of perfect aesthetic coherence. Accuracy of the drawing at the contour of a whole vision.

The first aim of this work places a whole lexicon of forms, in a space where the impression of liquidity, of clarity, dominates and registers within « duration ».

The painter Yamou leads us through an invented landscape. He invites us to the discovery of a flora. With the tip of a very fine brush, he develops the design of a plant in which he enters so deeply, meticulously, in a bed that will remain the primordial and most secret place of the painting. His hand produces an infinite number of passages, nuances, and sprinkles his canvas with visions that his imagination whispers to him.

The painter lists the elements arising from his dictation. He seeds components that dream of blooming, large seeds with rounded forms keep in gestation a part of the puzzle. The mystery of being out of the vegetal while waiting for a nature. Paintings to compare to a lake landscape that seems to have always existed.

The workshop is something akin to a laboratory. The components it uses raise the issue of signs. The painter has full control over the concrete image of a representation that comes clearly from what he has always felt. His world is « under the waters » of a light softened by the liquid filter.

Yamou seems to have immersed his eye in optical laws. This immersion offers him a variety of elements of composition that create depth in weightlessness. The marine vegetal is of a hallucinatory character and calls for exploration. This fantastic universe is reminiscent of a detail of a painting by Jérôme Bosch. Some internal resonances from a  « white milk » also recall some paintings of Matta.

What is striking when meeting the artist for the first time is his determination. His restraint gives him a lordly attitude. A great sobriety preserves the richness of his inner world and lets him keep his strength and conciseness for the visual goal to achieve. Yamou seems unwilling to be distracted by anything, not to lose a minute of his progress in the language of forms.

There is something very mysterious about being so in the infinity of a singular figurative field of plants, seeds, herbs…. and the search for the fertility of the painting as if, coming from the desert, he never tired of giving to see a whole world of flora that opens the eyes to the drought….

But is it not as tenacious in memory when we have left the workshop, this range of a totally different color – an intense red on which fits the Arabic script. A red close to that which then inflamed certain walls of Pompeii!

Gustave de Staël

February, 2006

September 1993
in the exhibition catalog « Yamou », Almanar gallery, Casablanca.

« If you do not decompose bodies and if you do not corporify the incorporeals, the expected result will be nothing. » Hermes Trismegistus

Painting opens its abyss in the moment that the material becomes art-universe, life, when painting is painting, where the Mercurial gesture cultivates the virtuality of ineffable meaning, transcends the scriptures, erasures, where the metaphor becomes archaic resonances of the mind.

Thus begins the journey to a deflagration of recognized meaning, memory loses its referential meaning; the shift of the secret toward a new / other emergence which would be the vital breath of being, perhaps to better die after. Contemporary painting is necessarily more than a speculative retinal enjoyment, its rapport is not simply a negotiation between the visible and invisible, it is a sharp attitude, a way of being, of examining the history of the body, signs, gestures, even the most contradictory events: a state of mutation from one mind to another.

We are fully in the irreversible, it is only a matter of traveling in this old and new adventure with an open mind, an open body.

Yamou speaks of the internal momentum of his own gesture (to go further than the reflection of my gesture …), establishes intuition as a driver that makes him travel to other territories in which the body is freed from the clichés of mummification, from the speculative tyranny of nostalgia. Behavior that makes one move towards a sovereign state of art like an extreme laceration of one’s own body.

The painting of Yamou is done around an implicit center, absent, from which movements escape as shreds of light, of black, of blood: vaporous ochers, liquid reds…  A state of calcination, the ashes like a trace of a deadly ritual, the dazzling flash of planets in decay, a celestial liquidity, the return of the gesture onto itself, which takes back its initial speed to better control the trajectory of the material that is the body of the painting itself.

Having had the opportunity to be invited several times by Yamou to visit his studio in Paris, I detected each time in him this vibrant, venous concern, this state of alert. The interrogating look speaks to me of his materials, found objects, pieces of sheet metal, of wood, his pigments and other materials which give rise to torn structures, writings that develop towards the ultimate gesture, towards an emotion of loss.

There is in Yamou this trace of a tortured cursive script that takes hold of the hand, tries to put the accidents of the matter, the noises, the explosions, the fluidity in ocher. To bring things back to the center of gaze, a sort of archery, an exercise in determining precise movement even in the labyrinth of uncertainty.