Written by ARTHUR DEBSI

Born in 1937 in Tunis, Nja Mahdaoui grew up in the district of Bab Souika. A few years later, the family relocated to the coastal city of La Marsa, where Mahdaoui attended Koranic school. He simultaneously dedicated his spare time to drawing and painting. Yet, Nja Mahdaoui did not start his career as an artist, since he worked as an accountant at the Tunis Central Post Office in 1957. Two years later, he enrolled at the École Libre in Carthage, founded by Catholic Missionaries. Early on, he showed an appetite for art, learning easel painting and the history of art. Though the true encounter between Mahdaoui and Western art happened at the end of the 1950s. He visited Paris for the first time in 1959, discovering Le Louvre and its collection of ancient civilization arts. In 1961, he met the director of the Dante Alighieri Italian Cultural Centre in Tunis, Riccardo Averini, who organized several exhibitions of Italian contemporary artists. This pushed him to visit Italy, where he also submerged himself in its cultural landscape, especially visiting the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.  

In 1965, Nja Mahdaoui decided to go back to Europe. He relocated to Rome to train in painting and art theory, by taking courses at the Accademia di Sant’Andrea. He also attended private courses at the studio of Romanian artist Zoe Elena Giotta Frunza – former pupil of Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). In 1967, Mahdaoui returned to Tunis, where he participated in a group exhibition, alongside the Tunisian artists Nejib Belkhodja (1933-2007), Naceur Ben Cheikh (1943-), Juliette Garmadi, and Fabio Roccheggiani (1925-1967) at the Galerie Yahia. A booklet written by Mohamed Aziza entitled Un Ton Neuf, accompanied the show, and stood for a manifesto, saying: "Voici qu’en Tunisie, cinq peintres refusent les facilités d’un folklorisme de pacotille, les tentations du typique, et optent pour la difficulté de la confrontation et les risques de l’ouverture"¹. For these artists forming the ‘Group of Five’; it was important to innovate the artistic Tunisian trends, and more specifically the group called École de Tunis. Founded in 1948 by French artist Pierre Boucherle (1894-1988), this group gathered Italian and Tunisian painters, such as Ammar Farhat (1911-1987) and Abdelaziz Gorgi (1928-2008). Their artistic program aimed to celebrate the local and traditional culture of Tunisia, depicting outdoor scenes in the old city. They took inspiration from the Arabic miniature technique. Nja Mahdaoui went beyond these folkloric themes, asserting: “Folklore – I have nothing against our cultural heritage, which we must cultivate, enrich, and respect. But what does this have to do with painting? (…) An aberrant habit born of the deliberate desire to please imposes a pale caricature of our beautiful folklore on our artistic mores”².

In 1968, Nja Mahdaoui was granted a scholarship by the Tunisia Ministry of Culture, which enabled him to travel again to France. There, he resided for two years at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, while being an external candidate at the École du Louvre in the department of Oriental Antiquities. He was hired at the Paris branch of the Union Tunisienne de Banques in 1969, while joining the artistic and intellectual circles of the city. British researcher Dr. Venetia Porter wrote that Nja Mahdaoui was however not “interested in becoming an artist in exile”³. The artist consequently went back to Tunisia, where he worked in his studio in La Marsa, in 1977. 

In 2000, Nja Mahdaoui won an international competition run by Miracle Graphics in collaboration with Gulf Air, and designed the external décor of four aircrafts of the company, which was celebrating its 50^th anniversary⁴.

The oeuvre of Nja Mahdaoui is extremely rich, encompassing a wide range of materials, such as tapestry, drums, ceramic, and papyrus to name a few. Moreover, the artist’s work has been included in some public spaces like in the international airports of Riyadh, and Jeddah, for which he produced the interior decors in 1981. The ability of Mahdaoui to combine art with diverse disciplines was also proven when he created six dresses for the Fall/Winter collection, ‘Calligrams’, launched by the London-based fashion designer Marios Shwab in 2013. Yet, all of Mahdaoui’s executions are characterized by one specific element: the Arabic letter, harf. As of the 1960s, Arab artists integrated more and more letters in their artworks, seeking inspiration from their artistic heritage in order to impose their authenticity, or ‘Arabness’. The word harf gave rise to the movement of hurrufiya, which spread all over the Middle Eastern region, especially in Iraq and Syria. The use of Arabic letters in art was a way to reunite Arab people under a common visual language⁵, and not only a local one. This happened especially after the defeat of the Six-Day War in 1967, when Arab countries aimed to show solidarity between each other.  

Between the 1960s and 1970s, Nja Mahdaoui mostly lived in Europe. It was specifically there that he reconnected to his Arab-Islamic culture. He recalls with great precision that Padre Di Meglio encouraged him to work on calligraphy, from the Middle East and Asia, at the Accademia di Sant’Andrea in Rome: “It was through Padre Di Meglio that I first had a theoretical contact with my culture and became truly aware of the depth of the Arab and Islamic civilization”⁶. Later on, in 1968 in Paris, Mahdaoui met the French art critic and author Michel Tapié de Céleyran (1909-1987), who was a true catalyst in his career and his plastic research. It is worth recalling that the latter was attracted to the practice of calligraphy by Middle Eastern contemporary artists, who followed a strong artistic tradition: “I would also point out in this connection that the countries with a (sometimes very long) tradition of calligraphic art are the only ones normally capable of connecting seamlessly with the most advanced sets of signs understood as abstract spaces imbued with artistic meaning, from Japan to the Islamic Mediterranean by way of China and the Middle East”⁷.

Nja Mahdaoui discovered Iranian and Japanese calligraphies through Michel Tapié de Céleyran (1909-1987). Yet, the artist had always been familiar with Arabic script, firstly by studying at Koranic school. In parallel, Mahdaoui used to see the works of his mother, who was producing embroidery calligraphic work on silk. These elements from his visual memory contributed to the elaboration of his experimental process, seen for example, in the impressive work Composition (2013), part of the Dalloul Art Foundation’s collection. In this captivating painting, Nja Mahdaoui incorporated Arabic letters, which refer to two types of calligraphic style. The first style, nasta’liq, in the middle of the composition, is characterized by curved lines, and is typical from Muslim countries like Iran, India, and Pakistan. The second style, thuluth, visible in the colored frame-like tapes, is mainly employed as ornamental elements⁸. Although calligraphy is a traditional practice in the Arab-Islamic world, Mahdaoui reinterpreted it in a peculiar style, blurring the boundary between the painting and writing. As a matter of fact, the artist shows how he is interested in the gesture and the disposition of the elements, more than rendering a proper literal meaning to the words. He said: “By choosing the letter whose source is Arabic calligraphy, I intend to free it through gesture. In working with the morphology of the letter, while detaching it from its linguistic content, I retain the framework and form that enable me to preserve the aesthetic ritual”⁹. Optimizing the full space of the canvas, Mahdaoui created a sort of labyrinth, playing with curved lines (al-muqawwar), straight lines (al-mustaqim), as well as geometrical forms, that he fit together. The artistic approach of Nja Mahdaoui is linked to freedom. He freed himself from academism and cultural codes the same way he freed the letter from its message.

Nicknamed by curator Rose Issa as the ‘choreographer of the letters’, Nja Mahdaoui is an artist. His experimental work contributed to the elaboration of an authentic art, proper to the Arab-Islamic culture and identity. Through his innovations, Mahdaoui created a contemporary oeuvre, based on Arab-Islamic artistic tradition, but tending to be universal. Indeed, the artist does not conceive calligraphy as a communication tool, but as a free means of expression, in which he correlates the Arabic letter with human movement.

Nja Mahdaoui is based in Tunisia, where he works.

Notes

¹ ‘Here we have five Tunisian painters that reject the easy path of tawdry folk art and the temptations of cliché in favour of the difficulties of confrontation and the risks of broader horizons.’ Aziza, Mohamed. Un Ton Neuf. Excerpt for the exhibition booklet, Tunis, Galerie Yahia, 1967. Quote in Issa, Rose. Nja Mahdaoui: Deconstructing Calligraphy. Milano, Italy: Skira, 2015. [P.12]

² Moncef S. Badday with Nja Mahdaoui, ‘Je peins l’homme fourvoyé dans l’effrayant labyrinth de ce siècle/Un Vrai Langage de formes’, L’Action, November 18 1996. Translated from French by Aubrey Gabel in Lenssen, Anneka, Sarah A. Rogers, and Nada M. Shabout. Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018. [P.257]

³ Porter, Venetia. ‘Introduction’ in Issa, Rose. Nja Mahdaoui: Deconstructing Calligraphy. Milano, Italy: Skira, 2015. [P.13]

⁴ Issa, Rose. Nja Mahdaoui: Deconstructing Calligraphy. Milano, Italy: Skira, 2015. [P.391]

⁵ Porter, Venetia. Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East. London, United Kingdom: British museum Press, 2006. [P.18]

⁶ Interview of Nja Mahdaoui in Biron, Normand. In the Memory of Time and Galligraphic Gestures in Issa, Rose. pp.cit., 2015. [P.372]

⁷ Tapié, Michel. ‘Le Message esthétique de Nja Mahdaoui’ in Calligraphies. Hommage à Nja Mahdaoui, monographic issue of Horizons Maghrébins: Le Droit à la Mémoire, year 14, no.35-36 (Toulouse, 1998) with Cahier d’études maghrébines, no.11 (Cologne, 1998), pp.166-167. Quote in Issa, Rose. op.cit., 2015. [P.14]

⁸ Porter, Venetia. Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East. London, United Kingdom: British museum Press, 2006. [P.20]

⁹ Interview of Nja Mahdaoui in Biron, Normand. In the Memory of Time and Galligraphic Gestures in Issa, Rose. pp.cit., 2015. [P.375]

Sources

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Lenssen, Anneka, Sarah A. Rogers, and Nada M. Shabout. Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018.

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