Mehdi Moutashar invests the Farinier of the abbey
For more than 50 years, the artist has developed a work at the confluence of two artistic heritages: geometric abstraction and the Arab-Muslim aesthetic tradition, his original culture. Between the arts of Islam and Western arts, his works are guided by the geometric framework inspired by calligraphy, textile and architecture. Compared to the ancient works presented at the Museum of Art and Archaeology of Cluny, the dialogue with the wooden frame of the Farinier of the Abbey of Cluny promises to be particularly rich.
Almost always dedicated to the perfect figure of the square, all its proposals are built from a frame, that is to say a system of measurement of the space. Indeed, he staged the concept of the Malevich square. Using a vocabulary of forms deliberately restricted, his work deploys according to purely logical procedures, as a series of doors opening indefinitely on each other.
It plays on the grammar of this square and the transparencies of materials, the repetition of which reflects the general composition of the building. In the same way, the very extensive scale of the ingredients that the artist uses, refers to the idea of a space that nothing stops and tends towards infinity. It uses metal, thread and pigment as a game of deconstruction of the square, of folding, of reappropriation of space.
The angles of view, always different, that accompany the visitor’s wandering, are reliefs that both dig the ground and detach the work.