Mohamed Kacimi, The Mercurial gesture

September 1993
in catalog of the exhibition “Yamou”, Almanar gallery, Casablanca.

“If you do not decompose bodies and if you do not corporify the incorporeals, the expected result will be nothing.” Hermès Trimegiste

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.