Michel Gauthier, Painting in his garden

 

First, abstract paintings in the grip of an earthy material and a tense gesture – series of .Sands. (1989-1990), of .Soils. (1990-1991) and .Ochres. (1993-1996). Here we are in the deployment, perfectly controlled, of a matieriste abstraction which would not, however, have been enough to distinguish the art of Abderrahim Yamou.
Then come the paintings that deliver stealthy animal forms, with hints recalling the many prehistoric rock carvings of the Anti-Atlas – as if the painter were concerned with what could be, not the last or the final painting, but rather the first.

First, abstract paintings in the grip of an earthy material and a tense gesture – series of “Sands” (1989-1990), of “Soils” (1990-1991) and “Ochres” ( 1993-1996).  Here we are in the deployment, perfectly controlled, of a matiériste abstraction which would not, however, have been enough to distinguish the art of Abderrahim Yamou. Then come the paintings that deliver stealthy animal forms, with hints recalling the many prehistoric rock carvings of the Anti-Atlas – as if the painter were concerned with what could be, not the last or the final painting, but rather the first.

Then, in 1996, the plant world takes over Yamou’s work. In a rather traditional form, with the series of  “Landscapes” in which a compromise between the abstraction of his beginnings and the desire for a vegetal figuration appears to be negotiated, not without some bitterness.  One could probably say the same of the “Black Flowers” characterized by a strong tension between the floral motif, which refuses color, and a pictorial field that wants to be nothing other than an acre of land, plowed, worked, scarred by the painter’s tools.  With the “Arabesques”, the movement toward the following big upcoming series seems to have become irreversible: with Adp (1998) or Duality (2000), the arabesque, the vegetal interlacing assume their decorative tropism and occupy the entire pictorial field.  The authority of a color was necessary for the rupture to be definitively consumed.  It was green –it could not have been otherwise, since it was a matter of plants, branches and leaves.  The step out of a certain modern tradition is certainly not simple.  First, it happens as if in a mist (Landscapes of the centre 1, 2 and 3, 2000).  The painting becomes atmospheric to go towards what now requires it, fascinates it.

The art of Yamou will, in the following series, cultivate a profuse repertoire of germinations, flowerings and arborescence.  “Seeds”, “Chords” or “Germinations” and the whole of the recent production, which can no longer be organized into series, now only have one single object: the biotic factor.  Skillful harmonies make empty spaces, abstract motifs and figurative forms coexist on the canvas, evoking at once macrocosm and microcosm.  All these skillful plays on chromatic values, scale, shadows, lights, reflections, flat tints, shades and transparencies –weave an imaginary floral world which perhaps recalls the Saharan garden dream.

Seeds Bird (2009): on a violet blue background which branches out into a grid-like rhizome, tearing apart to let a yellow light through, strange floral balls seem to fall vertically.  Superb painting that combines the resilience of a metaphysical abstraction and the laws of a precise representation.  Ashes and Seeds (2009): the same balls, twigs with thin branching, but also, seemingly escaping the figurative order, white dots of different dimensions and one black vertical line.  As if it were about putting together the vegetal figurations of the vital phenomenon and the primordial manifestations of the pictorial fact.  Coupling 10  (2009): next to the famous balls, on the edge of aquatic filaments, a purely pictorial being –a series of delicate vertical brush strokes, subtly going from shadow to light.  Three Vertical Stripes (2011): the band shrinks, multiplies and centres itself. One naturally recalls the zips of Barnett Newman, which the latter created in 1944, figurative drawings evoking germination and plant growth, whose verticality will be that of the zips which, starting in 1948, became the cardinal instrument of the painter, dividing the canvas into different monochromatic fields.  In Yamou’s painting, the three stripes contribute rather to a scrambling of the codes of perception.  While they appear to set the foreground of the canvas by delineating in depth a micro-organic environment crossed with interlacing, they are in turn as if pushed into the heart of this plasma by plant formations, with confounding shadows floating before them.

Four paintings among many others, just as troubling, that show a gradual indifference to the traditional opposition between abstraction and figuration.  Indeed, the painting of genesis for Yamou is also the genesis of the painting.  In the face of such works, the art lover is bound to recall the imaginary jungles of Henri Rousseau, but also certain arabesques and floral drawings of Christopher Wool, the virtuosities of Fiona Rae, or even the “époustouflances” of Rémy Hysbergue.  These references probably have their share of truth.  They fail, however, to explain the beautiful strangeness, the puzzling singularity of a painting that reclaims without complex the ancestral heritage of plant representations, while playing with different registers of pictorial abstraction in a way which, in the history of Western art, belongs only to post-modernism.

Michel Gauthier