Mohamed Aksouh

Mohamed Aksouh is an Algerian non-figurative painter from the New School of Paris, belonging to the generation of the founders of modern Algerian painting, born in Algiers in 1934, living in France since 1965. On the ground of a symbolic abstraction from the most ancient Mediterranean civilizations, it is on the fringes of any representative intention that Berber and Arab plastic traditions are inscribed in Algeria. Contesting in his “resourcing” the figurative and narrative vision introduced by colonialism by the “generation of the 1930s”, to which Aksouh belongs, there crystallizes pictorial modernity. It is from the luminosity of the native landscape that the non-figurative painting of Aksouh will develop, in the “quest for this light of mother-of-pearl and pearl which is that of Algiers, as he discovered it. from his mother's little house on the hillsides of Belcourt, a district which was also that of Albert Camus as a child ”, wrote Jean de Maisonseul, curator from 1962 to 1970 of the Algiers Museum. Mohamed Aksouh was born on June 1, 1934 in Bologhine (Saint-Eugène) and the Casbah was the setting for his childhood. Apprentice blacksmith from the age of fourteen, he began in 1958 pottery, ceramics and sculpture, then came to gouache, watercolor, and painting. After taking part, notably alongside Baya and Mohammed Khadda, in the exhibitions organized in Algiers after Independence, and having made a first personal exhibition, Aksouh moved to the Paris region in 1965. From the 1980s his approach led Aksouh to adapt even more closely to the solar flux which, depending on its intensity, colors and discolors things. Contrary to all impressionism, he does not attempt from the outside, from the moments of reality, to capture its variety, but builds its internal variation. The spraying of the brushstrokes will by degrees openwork on his canvases a tight swarm of spots and lines inflicted by distant eddies. Aksouh has held numerous exhibitions in France, Paris and the provinces, Switzerland, Algiers and the Arab World.