artist
Rachid Koraïchi

Algeria 1947. Lives and works in Paris.

"Koraichi's paintings pose an utterly contemporary aesthetic question, distinguishing them from both the classical art of Arabic writing in Arab art, and from the art of representation, whether it be naturalist, culturalist, or geometrist." [...]

"In Koraichi's painting, we are faced with several possible species of line: the real world, the pictogram, the shape of the heavens, the bestiary, magical geometry, the talisman. A chess game of signs, of gestural movements. In this art, it is the lancinating quality of the letter which provokes the figurative representation, but neither illustrates the other. If there be illustration, it is always an act of division: the letter divides itself, fuses, withdraws, according to the impulse and propulsion of the line. As soon as the gesture line achieves its power, it orients itself in Time.

The analyst intrigued by these prints will discern the references to classic Arab and Islamic culture, but this reference is matched by traces of popular culture, of research into forgotten languages, of the archaeology of writing from the pictograph to the formation of the alphabet, the stylized letter. Thus historicity is itself a collection of marks, lines, imprints, a game of paradigms. All we can see, all we can read are the traces which remain."

- Excerpts from A Nation in Exile by Abdel Kebir Khatibi
A Nation in Exile, Published by Darat al Funun - The Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation, 1997

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