The Condition of the Artist in "Terre d'Ombre brûlée" by Mahi Binebine

Born in 1959, Mahi Binebine's literary work explores themes related to political events and social issues that have marked contemporary Morocco, including the Tazmamart prison, illegal emigration and the scourge of drugs, which are visible in his pictorial compositions. Binebine composes large canvases that represent a human being in constant conflict with the universe. This struggle of Man against his own destiny is at the heart of "Terre d'Ombre brûlée", a fictionalized biography based on the life of the Moroccan artist Jilali Gharbaoui, a Moroccan painter born in 1930 in Jorf El Maleh, who has been passionate about art since his youth. Gharbaoui is considered the first non-figurative Moroccan painter. His abstract and lyrical painting is marked by the desire to make sensitive the spatial quality of light that he reveals through color, material and a gesture as pure as violent that transmits the pain of living of this artist, linked in particular to the desperate feeling of exile, born of his difficult position between two cultures. From his paintings emerges a human "cry", mirror of his life at the same time short, intense, anguished, generous and solitary.