Farid Belkahia was born into a cosmopolitan family in Marrakech in 1934.
At the time of the French protectorate over Morocco. Both his vocation as an artist and his rebelliousness emerged during his teenage years, when he started practising figurative painting as an autodidact. In 1955, as independence loomed, Belkahia left Morocco to study in Paris at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, taking classes at his pace while immersing himself in the vibrant culture and art scene of the French capital. He explored museums and galleries, revelling in the extensive presence of the cinema culture, frequently attending screenings at the cinématique française.
He also socialised with the aspiring Moroccan elite studying in Paris, As the 1956 declaration of independence brought a new, hopeful spirit, in the larger context of decolonisation. Furthermore, the emerging notion of the “Third world ” and “ Non-Aligned ” countries elicited great interest among French-based intellectual diaspora from the Maghreb and other African countries.
Belkahia himself became aware of the need to “decolonise the imagination ” of the other, and, after four years in Paris, he decided to go and see what was happening elsewhere in the world: “ After my studies in Paris, I wated to see how communism and socialism had found answers to cultural problem ”. He decided to settle in Czechoslovakia from 1959 to 1962. At the time, the regime governing the satellite state of the soviet Union was – relatively – loosing its authoritarian grip, especially in Prague where a dynamic cultural and artistic scene was emerging, around theatre in particular. Belkahia took notice of this and decided to take classes in set design in the capital in parallel to his drawing and painting. He also freelanced as a French-speaking announcer at the radio Prague, which gave him the opportunity to amplify the popular struggles for freedom occurring in various non-aligned countries, some of them supported by Czechoslovakia.
Belkahia works during his time in Prague were heavily influenced in style and content by the context of the post-war: Haunted by human figures and people`s suffering, It was allusively figurative and vigorously expressionistic at the same time, denoting the artist`s admiration fo the work of Paul Klee and George Rouault. Returning to – independent – Morocco in 1962, Belkahia entered another artistic phase, engaging in aesthetic and conceptual reflection that radically re-defined how to achieve modernity. As a director of the Casablanca`s school of Fine art from 1962to 1974, he championed new ways of passing on art knowledge to student, geared toward reclaiming and regenerating traditional arts in liberating departure from overbearing Western models of modernity – a process that he also applied to his own art.
Belkahia stint at the school of Casablanca was extremely significant for him and his art, he revisited the history and cultural heritage of Morocco, digging into the creative potential of its traditions, crafts and know-how. He started experimenting with new materials, such a copper: He Hammered, burned, oxidised, cut or crumpled the metal to obtain rich, textured surfaces out of which he created wavy, pliant and rhythmic bas-reliefs for constantly innovative abstract compositions. Later on, he turned to lambskin, rigorously testing the material as he assed its properties in to order to bring out is potential. The strength of the symbols, or the signs, is omnipresent in Farid Belkahia’s reflection towards the quest of origins. He was highly interested in the geometric forms such as the square, the triangle, and the circle, and revealed the multiple interpretations hidden behind them. They are manipulated as universal elements, which surpass the material reality, and materialize the process of creation itself. The artist attended some ceremonies in Morocco, particularly within the African Gnawa tribes, and discovered the phenomenon of trance. From this experience, he associated these motions of the body in a trance, with man who is abstract in nature. Farid Belkahia always placed man at the heart of his oeuvre. He conducted research on the relationship between Man and his past, and his culture, through a detailed analytical work of memory. With this rich iconographic vocabulary, the artist delved into the distant origins, involving various historical references. The transmission, and the perpetuation of the traditions – artistic, or social –, on which he shed light, appears to be the way towards self-knowledge. ‘Tradition is the future of mankind, as he said.
Farid Belkahia passed away in Marrakech in 2014.