The times of stone

Here I am again on the lands of Soualem, like yesterday. Soualem! Let us recall, a beautiful property located there, a family property where Mounat set up her workshop in a private house. A beautiful day of friendship, happiness and emotion, serene and fruitful. I would have liked to talk about it at length. But for a moment of hesitation, I said to myself that perhaps custom would require the catalog to forbid digressions and excesses. And yet! The layout of this workshop which circulates from room to room creates something rare and unheard of: the route could make one think of a sort of labyrinth by the repetition of the same theme which is at the very heart of this work of authentic aesthetic creation. There is something striking there which gives awakening. The very short space of this route suddenly opens onto infinite spaces and the short time onto time without measure. I did not choose. I do not have a preference for this or that painting by Mounat, as is the case when one fixes one's choice among the paintings of a painter in whom one is interested... Caught, immersed and perhaps even lost, I cannot separate Mounat's work into distinct paintings. However, I must say, I stopped in front of a triptych. The refusal of any dithyramb, the futility of any attempt at analysis are on a par with the impact of these meteorites, these fragments of a celestial body that cross the atmosphere and fall to earth, to follow the definition given by the dictionary Le Petit Robert.

During our conversations, Mounat and I happened to evoke a certain discourse of method, imperatively made of silence, gestures and uncodified glances inventing themselves as a slow meditation in the surge of an emotion in front of a canvas whatever it may be. The advice is well known. It would have been given by Klee or another famous painter, I don’t know. It is about taking a chair, sitting or standing, the mode of contemplation does not matter. It is about multiplying the looks, varying the angles of vision, even lying down at the foot of the canvas, not prohibiting oneself any fantasy to force the secret of the work. This secret, more generally speaking, that we live deep within ourselves without being aware of it as Jacques Derrida noted. It moves, it moves in all directions, we must make it move, turn it, turn it over to the point of forgetting that it is a canvas. And this continues, matures, ferments in his absence, outside of his presence, visible, evident. There is, in this regard between the visible and the invisible the fluidity of a dialectic without traces. And to think again of Bram Van Velde, one of the most admirable painters if ever there was one when he says, in an interview with Charles Juliet, that painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see what blinds it... In this night that envelops aesthetic creation, particularly in painting, one could think that one would have been lost in the darkness, carried away in the whirlwind of a faceless trance, the moorings broken. A blindness that moves like an increased lucidity in the burst of the moment... Thus, in front of what I hesitate to call a triptych or even to speak of it as a canvas, I say to myself, as if I were still talking to myself, as if I were ruminating, in the secret of my true silence, something that seeks and fears to say itself. It is prodigious, there is no other word to say it, to literally succeed in creating these stellar spaces in the infinitely reduced space of this canvas. Who says space, says light. Space, light, time of eternity. And the prodigious, yes the prodigious for our greatest happiness these meteorites, these compact fragments are seized in the continuum of their incessant fall. I happened to write on a sheet of cardboard, at random, a note not so insignificant as that, material in waiting: Mounat fell from the sky. A stone in the garden of painting and plastic arts.. Celebration of the stone, sanctified minimal celebration? This sacred side is to be emphasized even if it is lost in abysmal depths. In a very beautiful study Mohammed Chafik has developed a bold, almost subversive hypothesis. He will have demonstrated, with supporting archaeological, linguistic, and historical data that, contrary to common thinking, the pyramids would have their origin in these territories bordering the Sahara in prehistoric times, thousands of years ago; he will have consequently explored these tumuli, the Idebnan Bazinas, which prefigure the architecture of the pyramids... He evokes the piles of stones designated in Berber, under the name of Ikerkerkum; What is to be remembered mainly is the sacred side of these tumuli, of these piles of stones which are the object of a cult. Sacredness can be experienced in a broad and free sense, without being tied to a dogmatic, religious meaning. I would now like to clarify, so that no one is unaware, that this triptych is not a unique piece among other works, as one might expect. The entire work, composed of around forty canvases, is perfectly homogeneous, that is to say, in the literal sense of the word, of the same nature, here therefore around the same theme. It would be a sort of cosmogony without a defined order, broken into fragments, bearing traces of an unknown universe. But we are indeed in painting and not in the presence of some unknown astronomical vision...

I can now speak of what I consider to be an admirable bet held by Mounat. Where one would expect a monotonous, inert repetition drowned in the grayness of a faded monochrome to the point that one says to oneself the near impossibility of breaking this confinement, suddenly it changes... Watching, moving from canvas to canvas, walking in space. At random a canvas as an example. Three stones stacked on the left, one in the middle, two on the right distant. Second example shadow and light by three, the stones telescope in their fall. One would like to patiently multiply the examples and at the same time the pleasure of this enchantment. The subtle variation made of impalpable light is due to the fact that from canvas to canvas the evolution of these stones draws as many figures, forms as these stones create in their evolution.

It is obvious that Mounat does not start from a preconceived project, following a method, a path traced in advance. She carries within herself the rhythm of creative spontaneity. And it is chance in all the fertility of the unexpected that dominates. But Mounat seizes it, masters it to bend it to her desire in the moment of gesture and doing. Her intervention is not limited to that, these meteorites are not smooth stones, they are covered with a writing made of interlacing, cracks as if they were carrying traces of a distant, uncertain mystery... This is the completion of the entire work that she is going to present. I would like to say finally that these few lines, this text, without taking the head, is the fruit of this constant, substantial, nourishing dialogue, between Mounat, inseparable from her painting and the scribe that I am, let's say the public writer responsible for expressing his passionate, constant interest for this work of painting which, in its completely new truth will be a date in the course of Moroccan painting