Mohammed Khadda

Mohammed Khadda is a painter Algérie N, born in 1930 and died in 1991. He is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary Algerian Peinture and one of the principal representatives of what one names the School of the Sign .

Biography

Mohammed Khadda is born the March 14th 1930 with Mostaganem (Algérie).

Autodidact, it starts in 1947 to carry out watercolours, pastels and paintings, whereas he is typographer and draws the sketches of the models in printing works where he works since 1944.

In 1953 it comes with Abdallah Benanteur to Paris, where it draws the evening with the Académie of the Large Thatched cottage, binds with the novelist Kateb Yacine, militates for the independence of Algeria and carries out its first personal exposure.

Mohammed Khadda returns in 1963 to Algeria where it exposes regularly. Founding member in 1964 of the " National union of Plastiques" Arts; he is the secretary of 1972 with 1975, he there defends nonfigurative painting violently denounced at that time, illustrates several collections of poems (Jean Sénac, Rachid Boudjedra) and creates decorations and costumes for the Theaters of Algiers and Oran (Abdelkader Alloula).

In 1971 appear its Éléments for an art nouveau , introduction to the history of art in Algeria.

Mohammed Khadda works, between 1973 and 1976, with the realization of several collective murals, accompanies by its drawings, in the Eighties, of the collections in particular of Bachir Hadj Ali, Tahar Djaout, Habib Tengour, and gathers in 1983 in dependant scattered Feuillets the majority of its articles and forewords.

It takes part in 1986 in the inaugural exposure of the permanent collections of the Institut of the Arab World of Paris.

Khadda prefaces in 1989 Arbitrary the , text (on torture) and poems of Bachir Hadj Ali, in 1990 a book on Mohamed Racim. It works simultaneously with the constitution of Algerian sections of the Ligue of the Human rights and of Amnesty International.

He dies in Algiers the May 4th 1991.

Work

Attentive with the evolution of the European art, enriched by its dialog since the beginning of the century with the expressions of the other continents, Khadda discovers that Western great painters, beyond the interest of the cubists for the African art of the masks, take as a starting point elements of the Arab culture: “That Matisse used elegantly of the arabesque, that admirable the Paul Klee was dazzled by the East, that American Mark Tobey took again the signs of the Far East. That Piet Mondrian remade, without its knowledge, the magic of the Koufi”, pure balances, illegible squares with the first access, “between the full ones and the vacuums, light and the obscure one”.

Since 1954 the painting of Khadda is detached from any realistic figuration, felt like foreign with the sensitivity of Maghrebian art, “a nonfigurative art par excellence”, still writes it. In the following years its abstraction is pressed on the plastic elements of the Arab C-W communication. Its free Alphabets will do of him one of the founders of what Jean Sénac will name “the School of the Sign”.

At the beginning of the Années 1960 the knotty layouts which structured its nonfigurative landscapes contract and are réarticulent, as from 1967, around the topic of Olivier who, declares it then, is “with the birth of the signs and the writing” that he proposes.

These signs, thereafter, on the one hand will be different in a continual expansion and will enable him to always spell other figures, as one said in this connection, of the " large book of the visible" , of the faults of the stone to the flight of the bird, the meanders of the wadi to the Penmanship of the algae . They go in addition, like prosecutor further their crystallization, to spread itself freely in their own space.

Discovered writing of the world and exploration of the world of the writing will remain thus in its work indissociablement dependant in two complementary routes, each one resounding with measurement on the other, which will not cease bringing closer per degrees the painter, in a single search, same sources of the Sign.

In the Années 1980 Mohammed Khadda more anchors her advance on the Letter. “I did not never employ the Letter for the Letter”, specify it, “in my paintings or my engravings, one finds a little the shape of the letters, the forms because I refuse to employ the Arab Letter such as it is”.

Its paintings are never seized, indeed, of a completed writing, “registered” already, but give to test the dash of a writing originally “inscrivante”. Exploring its gestures freely, upstream of conventions which codified them in the advent of the first alphabets, Khadda is done, has one says, “the archeologist of possible”.

Judgments

“To have again known to make be the charm of elementary, it was necessary that Khadda was a magician. It was, would say I, rather a geomancian, that which reads the signs in the sand and which, especially, starts by tracing there. (...) But neither passed, neither present, nor future: in the fabrics, the drawings of Khadda, is given to reading what, eternal, confuse in him last, present and future. ”

Mohammed Dib, 1994

Selective bibliography

Khadda , Algiers, Bouchène Editions, 1987.
multiple Algeria, expressions , (Baya, Issiakhem, Khadda), foreword of Henri Marchal, introduction of Kateb Yacine, texts of Jean Pélégri, Jean de Maisonseul, Benamar Mediène and Michel-Georges Bernard, Paris, Books of the ADEIAO n° 5, 1987 (ISBN 290626704X).
Khadda, of meridian line zero ad infinitum of possible the , Art schools n° 1, Algiers, National museum of the Art schools, 1994.
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, 1995.
Khadda , Paris, Institute of the Arab World, 1996 (ISBN 2906062898).
Painters of the Sign - Mesli, Martinez, Baya, Khadda, Koraïchi, Samta Ben Yahia, Silem, Sergoua, Mohand, Yahiaoui, Tibouchi , (texts of Pierre Gaudibert, Nourredine Saadi, Michel-Georges Bernard and Nicole de Pontcharra), Festival of Humanity, Courneuve, 1998 (road show).
Mohammed Khadda, the adventure of the sign , Maghrebian Horizons n° 37-38, Toulouse, Toulouse University Mirail, 1999.
Mohammed Khadda, 1991-2001 , Algiers, National museum of the Art schools, 2001.
Mansour Abrous, Algerian artists, biographical Dictionary, 1917-1999 , Algiers, Casbal Editions, 2002.
Michel-Georges Bernard, Khadda , Algiers, ENAG Editions, 2002.
Jean Sénac, Faces of Algeria, Glances on art , Paris, the Paris-Mediterranean and Algiers, EDIF 2000, 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° 20,2002 (ISBN 290626721X).
Khadda , Paris, UNESCO, 2003.
Northern Arte contemporanea LED Africa , in Africa E Mediterraneo , n° 43-44, Bologna, 2003.
Signs of Algeria , Méditerranées, Arearevue , n° 5, Paris, 2003.

Internal bond

contemporary Algerian Painting

External bonds

Official site selection of images (24 paintings, 7 watercolours and engravings)
Texte of Mohammed Khadda on Algerian painting.

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