Art and Natural Light: The Geography of Moroccan Light in My Painting

There are places in the world where light has a particular quality, immediately recognisable, impossible to explain entirely through scientific data. The light of Casablanca is one. It is not simply a matter of solar intensity or declination angle — though Morocco is favoured in this respect, with a luminosity that can be cruel in summer and movingly gentle in winter. It is also a matter of materials: the ochre of medina walls that reflects light and gives it a specific warmth, the whiteness of Casablanca's modernist facades that amplifies and hardens contrast, the transparency of the air of the Atlas high plateaus in November. These lights are not found in Northern Europe, nor in the United States, nor even in other Mediterranean countries. They are Moroccan.

My sensitivity to this light formed slowly, through the accumulation of perceptual experiences I was not seeking to analyse. Childhood spent observing interiors changing through the hours of the day, studies at the Beaux-Arts where Mohamed Hamidi taught us to look before drawing, early trips to Europe that suddenly made visible, by contrast, something I had absorbed without naming it. It was only when I began working with cellulosic paint, around 2020, that I understood how deeply my visual memory of Moroccan light would become the central programme of my work.

Cellulosic paint is the medium that allows me to come closest to what I want to do: to capture not light as it appears at a given moment, but light as it remembers itself. A well-applied surface of cellulosic paint on aluminium has this strange property of seeming to emit its own light rather than simply reflecting it. When a visitor at an exhibition stops in front of a painting and says: 'It looks like there is a light source inside,' I know I have reached something. This is not represented light — it is light produced by the matter itself, by the way pigments have been bound and layered.

Geography plays a role in painting in many ways. For Turner, it was the fog of the Thames and the unstable skies of Lake Como. For Matisse, it was the light of Collioure, then Tangier, where he came expressly to find a clarity he had never seen. For me, it is the light of Morocco — not an exotic or picturesque light, but an inner light, that of a childhood and a formation, that of a mental as much as a physical space. I do not seek to transcribe it: I seek to continue it in another medium, to give it a form that allows one to feel it without necessarily having lived it.

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