Najia Mehadji Moroccan, b. 1950

We know that a recurring part of Najia Mehadji's work devotes the vital impulse of Nature. Her contemporary sensitive abstraction, her elementary colors, her vibrant monochrome sections, her dynamic gestures without the slightest repentance, her flexibly continuous lines, like the arts of Islam the reversibility of surface and background, her architectonics and her feminine calligraphy, capture in her own unique way "its forces".

For thirty years, her series Constellation, Gradient, Vague, Volute, Arborescence, Végétal, Floral, Fleur / Flux, Vanité, Spring Dance, War Flower, Rosebud - the generic title of his latest opus - have combined what is separate: the body and the mind, the hand that thinks and the eye that touches, the rhythmic structure and its melodic variations, the imprint and the flow, the dazzling miracle of the ephemeral and the fertile desire for the very great duration.

But how can we fight against "the nightmare of History" that denies humanity? Contrary to what weighs us down, in her paintings, her drawings, her prints - "in human there is a hand" - through her mix of multi-colored white pleats and luminous spatial expansion, Najia Mehadji delivers the best part of being. Her immemorial faculty to desire "living life." Her fervor to make the invisible visible. To symbolize that which endures but which, hidden away, proves to be both intimately close and infinitely distant.

What ethics? What aesthetics?

Her celebration of the Floral, the wheel of time where nothing is lost and everything is transformed, is a "visual balm" enchanted by the pleasure of the senses and the genuine emotion of giving meaning to what haunts the human species. "The rose is Eros and Thanatos. The flower of love, of the ephemeral, of offering, of mourning; but also, from my point of view, a star of the cosmos," writes Najia Mehadji in one of her workshop notes.

Pascal Amel