10.05.1929–08.04.1971
Jilali Gharbaoui
Jilali Gharbaoui (1929–1971) is remembered in Moroccan art as the painter who came first to informal abstraction: gestural brushwork, dense paint, colour as light. An orphan from Fez, he studied in Paris, lived in Rome and exhibited from Casablanca to San Francisco and Montreal. He died in Paris at forty-one and was buried in Fez.
Biography
He was found dead on a public bench in the Champ de Mars in Paris in April 1971. His body was taken home and buried in Fez.
The beginning was quite different. Jilali Gharbaoui was born on 10 May 1929 in Jorf El Melha (now in Sidi Kacem Province). His father and mother died when he was about ten, and he was taken into an orphanage. After secondary school in Fez he sold newspapers and laid out his drawings on the ground. In 1944 they were noticed by Marcel Vicaire, inspector of native arts and curator of the Batha Museum in Fez. He passed the boy on to his colleague, the writer Ahmed Sefrioui, and for several years Gharbaoui attended evening classes at the Academy of Arts in Fez.
Sefrioui, who became director of fine arts in Rabat, helped him obtain a scholarship. In 1952 Gharbaoui went to France and entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He studied there for four years, then worked for about a year at the Académie Julian; by other accounts, his connection with the academy lasted until 1958. He was interested in Impressionism, old Dutch painting and German Expressionism, and in those years began to turn towards abstraction. He made friends with the poet and painter Henri Michaux, with Hans Hartung, Jean Dubuffet and the critic Pierre Restany.
After that his path ran between Morocco, Paris and Italy. On returning to Morocco (in 1955, according to some accounts) he settled in Rabat. He spent between one and two years in Rome: by one account Farid Belkahia gave up to him a place at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, by another he received a grant from the Italian government and lived there from 1958 to 1960. His first exhibitions also belong to the second half of the 1950s: in 1957 at the Galerie Venise Cadre in Casablanca, in 1958 at the Italo-Arab Centre in Rome, in 1959 in Rabat and Casablanca under the French cultural mission. From 1957 he was often hosted at the Benedictine monastery of Toumliline in the Middle Atlas, near Azrou, where he made wall decorations. The monastery was closed in 1968. In 1959, back in Paris, Restany introduced him to the Informel circle at the Salon Comparaisons. After that his work was selected for travelling exhibitions in Japan, Mexico and Germany. He also exhibited in Egypt, the Netherlands, the United States and Brazil, and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, according to some reports, he won first prize. His work was published in the magazine Souffles-Anfas.
He painted fast, by gesture. Toni Maraini saw in his pictures movement and “nervous brush-strokes”, chromatic disorder and an energy that creates a neutral space and an active, expressive material. In 1990 Restany spoke of coloured gestures that make the matter within the colour vibrate. Mohamed Sijelmassi held that on his return to Morocco Gharbaoui wanted to leave the “geometric traditions”, giving the canvas movement, rhythm and, above all, light; in his work there is no anecdote and no direct allusion, and colour, matter and gesture are enough to evoke now the gardens of Chellah, now the mountain springs of the Atlas. Hamid Irbouh places him and Ahmed Cherkaoui among the “bipictorialists”, who combined Moroccan and Western influences, in contrast to the “nativists” of the Casablanca School around Belkahia. To my mind this comparison is more accurate than the usual “founder of modernism”: it shows with whom and against what he worked.
In his last years he lived partly in Rabat and partly on the road. In 1962 he showed work at the Galerie La Découverte in Rabat, in 1965 at the Galerie Nationale Bab Rouah, and in 1966–1967 he travelled to Paris and Amsterdam and exhibited in Amsterdam and Montreal. From 1968 he lived at a hotel by the Hassan Tower in Rabat and made a great many gouaches for one collector. In 1971 he stayed in Paris with the critic Pierre Gaudibert.
He has been remembered more than once since his death. In 1980 a retrospective was held in Rabat at the Galerie L’Œil Noir, and in 1993 a large retrospective at the Arab World Institute in Paris; the documentary “Gharbaoui, à corps et à cris” by Faten Safieddine appeared the same year. In 2012 his work was shown at the Bank Al-Maghrib Museum in Rabat. Works are held by the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, the Musée de Grenoble, the Paris municipal contemporary art collection and the Mathaf museum in Qatar.
Profile notes