Travel and Transcendence

By Raziqueh Hussain, *Path of Roses* Khaleej Times - Dubai, UAE; Friday, May 6, 2011

His ancestor, Okba Ibn Amer Al Koraïchi is mentioned among the companions of the Holy Prophet (Peace be upon him) who entered Africa in the 7th century.

These were men who carried with them the new religion of Islam, the ideas of the Sufis and a resilient knowledge of how to survive in the very sterile desert world into which they came.

“I’ve recently begun a project in the gateway to the Sahara to create a date-palm plantation from scratch, to understand better how these men lived in that harshest of places with a simple subtlety of understanding that modern city-dwellers will never properly understand.

I’m returning to the desert — a place of real beauty and an exquisite silence. I consider the date-palm plantation and a few other similar projects that I’m developing to be pure works of art in themselves. Maybe this is the output of my ‘mature period!’” says Rachid Koraïchi, born in 1947, who works across a wide variety of media, beginning with the painting of signs, symbols and glyphs of his own invention on paper, ceramic, clay and so on.

He also creates metal sculptures, and works with craftspeople from very different traditions to create woven silk or linen wall-hangings, which are dyed using traditional techniques, and embroidered with figures, or texts using gold threads to create beautiful finished objects. He also collaborates with potters, poets, stonemasons, weavers — the list is quite long!

His key pieces combine many of these individual works into single installations that pay homage to the great Masters of the Sufi tradition, such as Jalal al-Din al-Rûmî, Farid ud-Din ’Attar, Muhyi al-Din ibn ’Arabi and others. It’s not something that can easily be described in a few words — the works are to be experienced at first hand, and it was possible at the Tariq Al Ward (Path of Roses) installation on display at the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Festival.

Premiering for the first time in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], this extraordinary installation explores the Islamic concept of Safer (travel and transcendence) and pays tribute to the thirteenth century poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi. His Excellency Shaikh 
Nahyan Mubarak Al Nahyan and Her Excellency Mrs Hoda Ibrahim Al Khamis Kanoo were accompanied by Koraïchi through a viewing of the highly regarded masterpiece of contemporary Arab art.

His journey towards arts stemmed from a mixture of his early surroundings, the environment he grew up in the Aurès Mountains in Algeria, a place of great natural beauty. But the influences of that area, the architecture, the simple inscriptions on the walls, the sights, sounds and smells, all contributed something — and led him to begin formal training in the Colleges of the Beaux Arts, first in Algiers and later in Paris, where he was fortunate enough to study with several different masters in a variety of ateliers.

It’s music that inspires him, both classical western music and also the old traditional music of Algeria and the Arab world. “If I have some music playing, it could be opera, say Verdi, Mozart, Puccini, anything like that, and an endless succession of cups of tea — then I am happy — and I can work for as long as I need to,” says the artist who’s an avid traveller.

He has worked with many fine calligraphers, like the late Kamel Ibrahim of Egypt or the Iraqi calligrapher Hassan Massoudy. “These men truly are calligraphers — but what I do is different, I’m an artist. As for poetry, which in essence is the beautifully expressed thoughts of other men — that’s an obvious source from which to draw new inspiration,” he says, adding, “One might take the work of a great contemporary poet — like Mahmoud Darwish who was a good friend — and whose powerful poetry moved me, and thousands of others too, so deeply. We collaborated on several sets of his poems, where I put written signs, symbols and abstract shapes together in order, not to ‘illustrate’ his poems, one could never do that! — but to recreate the intensity of the ‘birth pangs’ of those poems in another form. The combined work of Mahmoud’s poetry, my engravings and the calligraphy of Hassan Massoudy was published as a work called ‘The Nation in Exile.’”

Leonardo da Vinci used to write in mirror script and so does Koraïchi. “Well, I’m left-handed and always have been. It’s rather like belonging to a secret society or brotherhood, maybe it explains why I think a bit differently, it certainly explains how I learnt, quite naturally to write backwards — the mirror-script that can often be found in my artworks is a direct result of this inversion,” he reveals.

He is quite gregarious and loves to be in good company but only some of the time. “But I also need — more than anything else in the world — time to be absolutely by myself. Without that I can’t work — it’s the source of concentration and I can spend long periods entirely alone. I like my own company too!”

He adds, “What frustrates me most, perhaps, is that despite the fact that my work has now been widely sought and collected by many of the major Museums of the western world and beyond — the British Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Centre Pompidou — not one of my pieces has ever been purchased by a national institution in Algeria. So, even though I’m an Algerian artist, you can’t go to a single museum in Algeria, or a library, or a park to see one example of my work. It just seems odd.”

So how different has this year been from the rest? “My work has continued to develop over the last forty years so nothing really stands out as having changed in just one year. But as one gets older one realises that one entertains a belief in ones own immortality — which is a really foolish idea. So, taking stock of where I’ve come from and where I stand today — I realise how much more there is still to do — and the jolt of that realisation makes me concentrate even more on bringing a few important projects to a satisfactory conclusion.”

The old maxim ars longa, vita brevis (Art is long, life is short) is absolutely correct.