Rabat – The opening of the exhibition "From writing to painting" by Tahar Benjelloun took place on Tuesday at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat.
This retrospective exhibition, which continues until 30 June, celebrates the literary and pictorial talent of Tahar Benjelloun and highlights around forty of his recent works, accompanied by a precious selection of manuscripts from a dozen of his most striking novels.
Curated by Abdelaziz El Idrissi and Boubker Temli, the exhibition offers visitors "an immersion into the world of Tahar Ben Jelloun, where art and literature meet to reveal the luminous facets of the world", according to the organisers.
During a press conference organised on this occasion, the President of the National Museums Foundation, Mehdi Qotbi, expressed his warm thanks to all the partners who worked for the success of this exhibition, noting that the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat "welcomes with joy the artist Tahar Benjelloun who paints books and writes paintings".
Mr. Qotbi stressed that this exhibition highlights "a palette of colours deeply rooted in the soul of the Kingdom of Morocco, a country celebrated in the works of renowned artists like Eugène Delacroix and Henri Matisse".
For his part, Tahar Benjelloun affirmed that he had been influenced from a young age by painting, even before turning to reading and writing, noting that his childhood spent in Fes and Tangier deeply inspired the awakening of his artistic fibre.
"I move from writing to painting without premeditation and the relationship between the two is both intimate and different", he specified, noting that while his novels and poetry were "often imbued with the pain of the world", painting offered him the opportunity to express "the light of this same world, an essential dimension of his identity".
For his part, the co-curator of the exhibition, Abdelaziz El Idrissi, stressed that this event highlights the rich trajectory of Tahar Benjelloun, as an artist, journalist, novelist, and poet, recalling the deep link that the latter maintains with painting, as an art critic and friend of artists.
According to Mr. El Idrissi, one of the specificities of artistic creation in Arab countries lies in this culture that is both transversal and encyclopaedic, where artists "can move from writing to painting and vice versa".
This artistic immersion is essential to better understand artistic creation in a contemporary writer or artist, he noted.
A member of the prestigious Académie Goncourt since 2008, Tahar Benjelloun is one of the Francophone writers whose literary works are the most translated in the world. For more than a decade, he has been exploring the field of painting, thus marking his artistic versatility.
This article Rabat: opening of the exhibition "From writing to painting" by Tahar Benjelloun first appeared on MAP Express.