Jilali Gharbaoui

Landscape overlooking the city of Azrou

Jilali Gharbaoui (Arabic: الجيلالي الغرباوي; 1930–1971) was a Moroccan painter and sculptor from Jorf El Melha.^[1] He is considered, along with Ahmed Cherkaoui, a pioneer of modernist art in Morocco.^[1] Unlike other Moroccan modernist artists, his abstraction was based in brushstrokes and the "materiality of the paint" as opposed to Moroccan culture.^[2] Gharbaoui suffered from severe mental illness and died of suicide in Paris in 1971.^[1]

Life

He started studying art at the Academie des Arts in Fes.^[2] He traveled to France in 1952.^[3] With the assistance of the novelist Ahmed Sefrioui, then director of fine arts in Rabat, Gharbaoui was able to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.^[2] He studied for four years then worked at the Académie Julian for a year.^[3]

He befriended the poet and painter Henri Michaux, the painters Hans Hartung and Jean Dubuffet, and the art critic Pierre Restany.^[4]

With a grant from the Italian government, he lived in Rome from 1958 to 1960, when he returned to Morocco.^[3] In this period he frequently went to Paris for work, and in 1959, Pierre Restany introduced Gharbaoui at the Salon Comparaisons  [fr].^[1][3]

He was hosted often by Abbot Denis Martin at the Benedictine monastery of Toumliline, where he created wall decorations.^[1][3]

During his life, he exhibited around Morocco and in Egypt, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and Brazil.^[5] His art appeared in the magazine Souffles-Anfas.^[6]

He was found dead by suicide on a public bench in the Champ de Mars in Paris in 1971.^[1][2] His body was repatriated and buried in Fes.^[2]

In 1993, the Arab World Institute in Paris hosted a retrospective exhibition dedicated to him.^[2]

Art

Before he embraced abstraction in the early 1950s, Gharbaoui experimented with French Impressionism and German Expressionism.^[6]

According to Toni Maraini [it], "Gharbaoui’s work largely focuses on movement and nervous brush-strokes. With chromatic disorder and an automated vitality, he creates a neutral space and an active, expressive material."^[6]

In Art in the Service of Colonialism, Hamid Irbouh describes Gharbaoui and Ahmed Cherkaoui as "bipictorialists" in contrast with the nativists of the Casablanca School.^[7] Whereas the nativists, led by Farid Belkahia, sought to break entirely from French and Western art, the bipictorialists included Moroccan and Western influences, working toward a reconciliation of the various dimensions of postcolonial Moroccan identity.^[7]

References

1. Powers, Jean Holiday (2016), "Gharbaoui, Jilali (1930–1971)", Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (1 ed.), London: Routledge, doi:10.4324/9781135000356-rem434-1, ISBN 978-1-135-00035-6, retrieved 2021-07-22
2. "Composition". Barjeel Art Foundation. 2017-08-24. Retrieved 2021-07-22.
3. "Gharbaoui, Jilali". Benezit Dictionary of Artists. doi:10.1093/benz/9780199773787.article.b00073106. Retrieved 2021-07-23.
4. العرب, Al Arab (September 13, 2015). "الجيلالي الغرباوي الفنان الذي اخترع الحداثة الفنية في المغرب | فاروق يوسف". صحيفة العرب (in Arabic). Archived from the original on 2020-10-07. Retrieved 2021-07-27.
5. "Jilali Gharbaoui". www.encyclopedia.mathaf.org.qa. Retrieved 2021-07-22.
6. "Souffles-Anfas Contributors, 1966–1971", Souffles-Anfas, Stanford University Press, pp. 267–274, 2020-12-31, ISBN 978-0-8047-9623-1, retrieved 2021-07-27
7. Irbouh, Hamid (2005). Art in the Service of Colonialism. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 978-1-85043-851-9.