Mohamed Aksouh

Mohamed Aksouh is a nonfigurative painter Algerian of the News Ecole of Paris, pertaining to the generation of the founders of modern Algerian painting, born with Algiers in 1934, installed in France since 1965.

Biography

On the ground of a symbolic system abstraction resulting from oldest Mediterranean civilizations, it is in margin of any representative intention that are registered in Algeria the Berber and Arab plastic traditions. Disputing in its " ressourcement" figurative vision and narration which colonialism introduces the " generation of the years 30" , to which Aksouh belongs, there crystallizes pictorial modernity.

Among these artists, since a expressionnism trying to exorcize violences of the history until the identity assertion of the Sign, a large range of distinct tendencies affirms from the start. It is starting from the luminosity of the native landscape that as for it the nonfigurative painting of Aksouh will develop, in the " search this light of mother-of-pearl and pearl which is that of Algiers, such as it discovered it small house of his/her mother on the slopes of Belcourt, district which was also that of Albert Camus enfant" , will write Jean de Maisonseul, conservative of 1962 to 1970 of the Museum of Algiers.

Mohamed Aksouh is born on June 1st, 1934 in Bologhine (Saint-Eugene) and the Casbah constitutes the framework of its childhood. Apprentice blacksmith as of the fourteen years age, it approaches in 1958 the pottery, ceramics then the sculpture, comes then to the gouache, the watercolour, and painting. After having taken part, in particular at the sides of Baya and Mohammed Khadda, with the exposures organized to Algiers after Independence, and carried out a first personal exposure, Aksouh settles in 1965 in the Paris region.

Its painting, as from the Seventies, is characterized by a succession, under the finest lights, of broad flat tints of space, gray bluish or ochers fair. Null escape in its fabrics but rise there like undecided stagings of frontages, balconies, roofs or terraces, shutters and doors, stalls perhaps of shops. By a labyrinth of walls or staircases the light is thought of it, impregnating bleached colors with the lime of the walls which it seems to pass very close to. Or it is with back-light that it infiltrates, slipping in dubious interiors on diaphanous accumulations of objects, rays or piles of books. The outline of a ground wakes up there embrasures, diffuse silhouettes of windows, tables, drawers or racks.

Aksouh does not give up about it for as much its need first for a direct dialog with a resistant matter. At the same time it engraves, soda, abrades metal according to the new processes which it imagines, forging itself its tools, constituting itself as a dictionary of punches to the various reasons which will mix on its plates. The technique enables him to divert in an esthetic exercise the tools and the gestures of its trade and gives him the possibility of continuing in other means that those of painting the same search of the light. In 1972 and 1974 Aksouh creates also two medals for the “Monnaie of Paris”.

From the Eighties its step leads Aksouh to adapt more closely still on the solar flow which, according to its intensity, colors and fades the things. Contrary to any impressionism, it does not try outside, as from the moments of reality, to collect the variety of it, but builds some the internal variation. The pulverization of the keys will perforate on its fabrics a tight swarming of spots and features per degrees which inflect of distances movement. All the being of visible, unstable condensation of vibrations, dusty condition of Brownian movements, is not then any more in the painting of Aksouh only one furtive precipitate of the light.

A return of the color renews its work later. While is dissipated the solar vapor, it, around 2000, from is extended without horizon, is nimbées of tablecloths bluish or streaming of wild flowerings, that Aksouh, in another distance, will make from now on fly over.

Aksouh, which is regularly present at the Salon of New Realities, carried out many exposures in France, in Paris and in province, in Switzerland, in Algiers and in the Arab World.

Selective bibliography

Aksouh , preceded by mother-of-pearl to be it, paintings of Aksouh by Michel-Georges Bernard, Paris, Algerian Arts center, 1991.
Wind LED On, Luc, matéria I signs (as a Catalan and French), Sabadell (Barcelona), 1992.
effects of the voyage, 25 artists Algerian , (texts of Fatma Zohra Zamoum, Ramon Tio Bellido, Michel-Georges Bernard and Malika Dorbani Bouabdellah), Palate of the Congresses and the Culture, Mans, December 1995.
Aksouh (file), in Algeria Literature/Action n°22-23, Paris, 1998.

Jean Sénac, Faces of Algeria, Glances on art (Documents joined together by Hamid Nacer-Khodja) , Algiers, EDIF 2000 and Paris, Paris-Mediterranean Editions, 2002 (ISBN 284272156X).

Algeria, Lights of the South, Khadda, Guermaz, Aksouh , texts of Pierre Rey and Michel-Georges Bernard, Paris, Books of the ADEIAO n°20, House of the Social sciences, 2002 (ISBN 29026721X).

the XXè century in Algerian art (work published within the framework of the exposure presented to the Castle Borély, Marseilles and with the Orangery of the Senate, Paris), Paris, Aicapress, 2003 (ISBN 2950676812).

Méditerranées , Arearevue , n° 5, Paris, September 2003.

Northern Arte contemporanea LED Africa (in Italian and French), in Africa and Mediterraneo , n° 43-44, Bologna, 2003.

Michel-Georges Bernard, the painting of Aksouh , in Maghrebian Horizons , n° 52, Toulouse, University Presses of Mirail, 2005 (ISBN 2858167796).

Catalog of films

Hamid Benamra, Aksouh, Garden of the fabrics , 20 mn, Paris, Imagenese, 2006.

Internal bond

contemporary Algerian Painting

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