From a very early age, Saâd Hassani was close to members of the Casablanca School, and frequented influential circles of the art world in both Morocco and Europe. At 18, several exhibitions had already been devoted to his work.
Throughout his career, Saâd Hassani has developed an imagery that is all his own, based upon the technique of erasure. Strata of colours are added one by one, covering a motif, unmasking another. Thus, successive brush strokes reveal the subject that is tangible, as in Échiquier or Corps singuliers, and often enigmatic in the more abstract works.
Inspired by Abstract Expressionists, the artist never ceases to move away from form. Though the works from the period known as Échiquier are structured, and introduce fields of dynamic forces that anchor the composition, more recent works are attached to colour itself and its vibratory strength.
His most recent series, poetically entitled Chants de nuit, marks a new period in the artist’s career. He has undertaken the creation of large-format monochrome pieces whose emotional power bears witness to his dexterity and mastery of colour. Here, all traces of narrative or decoration are gone. The immense canvases, created with natural pigments of blue, rosy beige, white, and ochre, provoke intense emotion. Saâd Hassani paints silence, fleeting dreams, obsessions that dissipate and the passage of time. He paints the beauty of the world and its pain. A horizontal strip marks the centre of each of these large-scale paintings, incorporating the language of affirmed gesture that allows glimpses of vibrating traces of matter, opening onto a new world.
The new works created for the solo exhibition presented at Loft Art Gallery demonstrate, in a more contained format, the vital gesture already present in the canvases of Chants de nuit. The sense of movement produced by the succession of image layers, so characteristic of the artist’s work, is clearly in evidence, and the physical presence of the work opens to the viewer in its immediacy.
Here, paint dominates, and abstraction is taking to its apogee, exalting the creative power of the artist.
