A COUNTRY WHERE ART AND REALITY INTERTWINE
The attraction that Morocco has held for many great Western artists and authors over the past decades is explained, in my opinion, by the artistic savoir- faire which the country has used to forge tradition and modernism.
It is a country that not only welcomes strangers and enjoys the advantages of a healthy economic infrastructure and flourishing private development, but has also kept the vigor and the beauty of those magnificent contrasts so stunningly depicted by Delacroix in his paintings at the beginning of the 19th century. In fact, contemporary authors often take for their best works annotations from Delacroix's famous Travel journal.
The medinas and Moroccan villages fascinated Delacroix, He entered the darkness and silence of the alleys, explored narrow gorges, nooks and crannies. Before putting them down on paper, he made mental notes of passing silhouettes - of the elderly, the guards, the jews, the artisans, the veiled women - who hugged the walls or glided through the markets, crossing his field of vision like fugitives, before slipping away forever. All this is both an attraction and invitation for the artist.
Even I have had this same experience, but cruelly deprived by nature of the least bit of talent as an illustrator or a painter, I was only able through writing and photography, one helping the other, to reconstruct a landscape or a scene in detail. But how can one put across the hubbub at dawn in the square of Jemaa El- Fna? Which words could portray the entire range of nuances of Essaouira, with its changing and fleeting light?
Dazzled by the decor of Marrakesh and the small kasbahs of the Draa Valley, seized - almost hypnotized - by the elegantly sober minarets and hermitages, I felt all the frustrations and helplessness of someone who does not have the tools to throw himself into an adventurous creativity.
In Morocco, art and reality frequently intertwine so that the rough walls of buildings, made with bare hands, display thumbprints, just like certain paintings by contemporary artists.
On my terrace in Marrakesh, I have sometimes let my imagination wander like a vagabond. I have dreamed of reproducing on a page the splendid images that are offered by the traditional Moroccan home.
The meager resources available to me to string together nouns, adjectives, verbs - so derisory compared with the powerful images that painting has to recreate - led me to invent, as compensation, a different writing style; to contort, reshape and make transparent my writing, all in the spirit similar to an artist confronted with a canvas. Like them, I am searching for the basic essentials - absolute light, spark and clarity.
Hoempage article
By: JUAN GOYTISOLO
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