Ollin

Mohamed Melehi

FlammeWaves
FlammeWaves

Mohamed Melehi (1936, Asilah; 2020, Paris) painted one shape for fifty years and made it the signature of a country's modern art. He grew up in Asilah, a small port on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, and left it in 1953 for the School of Fine Arts in Tetouan, then Seville, Madrid, Rome and Paris, learning what a European academy taught and what the painters there were leaving it for. In 1962 a Rockefeller fellowship took him to New York, where he studied at Columbia and taught in Minneapolis, and in 1963 the Museum of Modern Art hung him in a group show of hard-edge and geometric painting. He had found the flat color and the hard edge, and he took them home.

Home was a Morocco eight years past independence. In 1964 he joined Farid Belkahia and Mohamed Chebaa at the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca and taught painting, sculpture and photography there until 1969. The three of them refused the colonial academy's easel painting and refused to copy New York and Paris in its place, and went instead to what was already on the walls and floors around them: the geometry of Amazigh carpets, jewelry, ceilings and doors. That was the Casablanca Art School. In 1969 they took their paintings out of the gallery and hung them for a week in Jemaa el-Fna, the main square of Marrakech, in the sun and the wind. Melehi designed the journal Souffles for the poets of the same movement and in 1971 founded Integral with Toni Maraini, and in 1978 he and Mohamed Benaïssa started the Cultural Moussem of Asilah, the festival that every summer since has had artists paint the walls of the medina.

The wave came in the middle 1960s and never left. It runs across panels, screenprints, posters, murals and the sides of buildings: a band of one color set beside a band of the next, every band the same undulating curve as its neighbor moved over by its own width, the colors in an order he kept returning to, yellow into ochre into red into blue into green, or two colors turn and turn about. The bands enter a panel straight, from a corner or an edge, and somewhere on the way break into the wave. In the 1970s the wave stood up and burned: rows of bands cut flat at stepped heights read as a flame, a straight ribbon crossing them; in the 1980s it rose out of walls of gray stripes and lay under painted suns. He painted in cellulose paint on wood, the lacquer of a car body, laid flat with no brush mark, one color up to the next and nothing between them, and he called the wave his handwriting. The curator who brought it to London read in it "movement, pulsation, fluidity and sensuality but also cosmic relations, playing out between the sun, the sea, the horizon". The Venice Biennale, which showed him for the first time in 2024, read the waves as flames and as magma bursting upward and traced them to the bands of the flatwoven Glaoua rugs of the Atlas. He died in Paris in October 2020, of Covid.

He belongs in this set because his rule is short enough to write down and rich enough to paint for a lifetime. One curve, moved over by one width, colored by one order: the two sketches here keep exactly that, and let the clock move the phase, which is the one thing a panel could only imply.

Learn more:

Recreations here

  • Waves: the hard-edge wave of the 1970s. One ribbon of bands crosses the panel on a slant, enters straight and breaks into the wave part of the way over. Every band edge is one curve, the run along the axis plus the wave across it, and each edge is the first moved over by one band width, so neighbors share their edge point for point and the fills meet with nothing between them. look picks a palette, and a palette hands its colors out by declared shares: each color gets its share of the bands in every cycle, spread as evenly as the counts allow and in the palette's own order. The wave travels because the phase is the clock, one wavelength per seconds, which is also the export loop. bands, bandWidth, amplitude, wavelength, straight and angle are the rest of the controls, and the seed turns the cycle and moves the ribbon. An original Ollin interpretation written from the paintings; there is no code to port, the work is cellulose paint on wood.
  swift run Example-Recreations-MohamedMelehi-Waves

The panel back as the regions the paint covers, every band one closed outline:

  swift run Example-Recreations-MohamedMelehi-Waves --seed 3 --param look=asilah --export-svg panel.svg
  • Flamme: the wave standing up, after Flamme (1975). A row of bands, pink and navy turn and turn about, rises from the bottom edge, each the same curve as its neighbor moved over by one band, and each cut flat at its own height, the tops stepping up to a peak and down again so the row reads as one flame. A straight ribbon of yellow, orange and blue crosses the panel behind it. Over a cycle the wave climbs one wavelength and every top breathes about its height, never past the steps to its neighbors and never under a hand's height from the bottom. bands, bandWidth, amplitude, wavelength, flicker, stripe and seconds are the controls, and the seed deals the peak, the steps and the ribbon's slant. An original Ollin interpretation written from the painting.
  swift run Example-Recreations-MohamedMelehi-Flamme

The flame as outlines, one per band and one per stripe:

  swift run Example-Recreations-MohamedMelehi-Flamme --seed 5 --export-svg flame.svg

This is a homage after Mohamed Melehi, made for learning. It isn't a reproduction of a specific work, and it isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the artist or his estate.

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