On May 18, 2017, So Art Gallery opened its doors to the exhibition "Jardins Secrets", which presented for the first time ever new works by internationally renowned Moroccan artist Hakim Ghazali. Orchestrated by Karin Adrian von Roques, one of the world's leading experts in contemporary Arabic art, this event aimed to focus on the artist's multi-faceted creative production, based on a strict selection of her works.
In his painting, Ghazali not only raises the challenge of purely formal aspects, but, in addition, he also cares about both philosophical and spiritual themes, in short, the existential questions of man as well as those pertaining to God. Which are reflected in his work as an artist. By reducing his pictorial means, he strives to express the main core and to bring his visions and inner views into the relationship with the external world that is tangible to him. In this process, it is mainly limited to very few colors, but the shades of white are infinite, depending on the number of layers of white tones that are superimposed on the table. Start with white, finish with white, as the artist himself usually says. For him, white means light, which is essential to life and which, in a literal sense, is the pure light of God. It is from here that a world of images of the highest spirituality appears.
Calligraphy played a big role in the artistic development of Ghazali, an art he had already practiced as a child. We could almost say that for him it was a kind of rite of passage, at least a starting point for an exceptional career, during which the message behind his artistic work is expressed in an ever more compact way. Calligraphy enjoys enormous prestige in the Arab world, since its appearance is closely linked with the written transcription of the Holy Qur'an. Hakim was introduced to the art of calligraphy by master Ali Haj Ahmed, but ends very early with the strict rules according to which classical calligraphy is worked. He used the possible methods he had learned for his own free expression. Thus the knowledge of the various interpretations of the individual letters of the Arabic alphabet has played an important role. This explains why a single letter is often found on his paintings as the letter Noun.
The other great influence on Ghazali's art began with a game he played as a child in his grandmother's walled garden. The game consisted of writing and drawing on the walls of the garden then to observe with attention its graffiti fade slowly until disappearing completely. He actually used a brush and paint, but he had so diluted it with water that his doodles were absorbed by the wall. This constant recurrence of paintings immediately created as soon as disappeared led him to imagine a hidden universe that would be hidden behind what is visible to us, and that to access it, it is necessary to have a special key.
Many of his works recall his first attempts at writing on the walls and then observe the disappearance of letters. Beneath all these layers of painting, letters, words, or even whole sentences can be divined, sometimes still legible, though still almost completely obscured. In these same paintings we will often find the same square motif that makes one think of a garden, like the one in which Ghazali spent much of his childhood. Even today, he works in a fenced garden in a secluded corner of the countryside. The square motif that recurs in his paintings represents the symbol of the garden, both terrestrial and celestial, but also the interior secret garden that is nestled in the heart of man.
In parallel with the exhibition will be published a catalog whose introduction was written by HRH Princess Sybille of Prussia, who herself is an artist and lives in Berlin. She is passionate about the work of Hakim Ghazali and the dimension encompassing the world of his artistic mission that goes beyond purely aesthetic issues. The Princess Sibyl of Prussia advocates a cultural dialogue, just like Hakim Ghazali, and in unison with the gallery and the curator. Art is a powerful vehicle for transmitting universal values and for building bridges between cultures, however different they may be.
Written by Mrs KARIN VON ROQUES
Curator of the exhibition
