Body and matter and contemporary views
In the heart of the Bank Al-Maghrib (Central Bank’s) Museum, a silent conversation is taking place between two artists whom everything seems to oppose: Moroccan Noureddine Amir and Mexican Miguel Milló.
One sculpts clothes, the other skins. One elevates textiles to a level of pure spirituality, the other covers bodies with earth, foliage, and silence. But there’s no confrontation here. The Dialogue exhibition, on view until September 30, 202, contrasts two practices based on the same gesture. Reinventing the body as a creative territory. What strikes you first is the intensity of the face-to-face encounter. Amir’s sculpted dresses, long, vertical and silent, seem to rise in space like textile totems. Suspended, backlit, they abolish the function of the garment, revealing themselves as autonomous, almost archaic forms.
Opposite them, Milló’s photographs of clay-coated bodies, draped in vegetation and topped with improvised masks, evoke another form of sacredness, more telluric, more tactile. Everything in this exhibition is based on tension. Between organic density and formal elevation. Milló’s figures, frozen in a carnal in-between, seem to respond to Amir’s dresses with an echo from the depths. Nourredine works with raw wool, raffia, sabra and natural materials dyed with henna or pomegranate. He doesn’t sew: he constructs. His dresses are slow architectures, with clean, almost architectural lines. The absence of visible seams, the unity of volumes, give them a silent monumentality. Milló’s process is the opposite, but just as sculptural. He covers the living body with raw materials, freezes it, metamorphoses it, then photographs it.
The result is a series of world-figures, halfway between indigenous ritual and Baroque icon. What the two artists share is a form of non-verbal thinking, an aesthetic of slowing down, almost meditative. In an age saturated with images and discourse, they choose to work in a long, crafted, ritualized temporality. Amir’s gesture is akin to that of a sculptor. Milló’s borders on the shamanic. Both summon ancient memories, buried knowledge. Their works are neither illustrative nor decorative. They carry a presence.
Amine Boushaba
