In this exhibition, Mohamed Abouelouakar presents the fruit of more than five years of assiduous work around two themes at the heart of his aesthetic preoccupations: the card game and the dialectic between life and death. The public will be able to discover a series of works with a rare capacity for appeal, works of blatant ferocity that demonstrate the extent to which the artist is inhabited by painting and very little concerned with retinal seduction. A case in point is the masterly painting of the torture of the mystic poet Hallaj, in which the artist has concentrated his entire aesthetic alphabet to create a work that is unprecedented in Moroccan painting.
A monograph entitled La Passion de Hallaj, dedicated to the recent work of Mohamed Abouelouakar, is published by L'Atelier 21 to coincide with this exhibition. The book shows that Abouelouakar's works, while revolving around a moving work depicting the execution of the Persian poet and mystic Hallaj, are permeated by multiple themes and myths, with the card game recurring like a leitmotif.
