Biography
Mohamed Drissi was a Moroccan artist born in Tetouan. According to Drissi’s widow, Maria Llardent Castillero, the artist often felt rejected by society due to his ethnic background and economic status. Drissi was raised by a working-class family from the Rif, a politically, economically, and socially disenfranchised region in northeast Morocco. He often expressed that the north was “abandoned by King Hassan II, who ruled the country from 1961 until his death in 1999. Drissi studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Tetouan (known today as the National Institute of Fine Arts) between 1963 and 1965. He continued his studies at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1968, the School of Fine Arts of San Jorge in Barcelona in 1970, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts San Fernando in Madrid in 1974. An internship at the School of Art and Architecture in Brussels followed his education. Drissi was an instructor at the Lycée Kadi Ayyad in Tetouan and the School of Arts and Crafts in Pamplona, Spain, and received a specialisation in art therapy from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1980.
Many Moroccan art historians have drawn a connection between Drissi’s struggles and his work's subject matter and formal qualities. Mohammed Rachdi asserted that Drissi’s “unrestrained” creations resulted from the artist’s retaliation against his austere and authoritative military father. According to Mostafa Chebbak, Drissi belonged in “spirit” and “experience” to a leading group of Moroccan creators active in the beginning of the seventies referred to as the “poets of the exodus or exile.” Known as the déracinés, or ‘uprooted’, this group included the likes of Mohamed Choukri, Jilali Gharbaoui, Mohamed Khaïr-Eddine, Abdellatif Laâbi, Mohammed Leftah, and Mohamed Zafzaf. What united these artists and writers was their so-called singular destinies, uprootedness, taste for subversion and revolt, and their refusal of any concession to established society. Chebbak believed that Drissi’s sculptures and canvases were a manifestation of Drissi’s “existential experience,” “nomadism,” “interior exile,” and his “voluntary exile” to Europe, which ended in his tragic death on 7 January 2003, in a metro station in Paris, France.
Drissi developed his signature artistic style in the 1970s and 1980s, during a socio-political turmoil in Morocco referred to as the “Years of Lead,” when any opposition to the state was a punishable offence. Drissi felt that he was constantly being watched and had first-hand experience with state-sponsored abuse. In 1977, while living in Tangier, Drissi was arrested, jailed, and brutally beaten by police for defending a street peddler who was being harassed by police. Many of his close friends were also targeted during these dark decades. One example is the author Mohamed Choukri, whose 1972 novel al-Khubs al-hafi (For Bread Alone) based on his personal experiences with poverty and prison, was censored. The book was banned by Interior Minister Driss Basri until 1999. Choukri noted that Drissi did not allow himself to hold back as an artist, rather, he fully expressed the human condition in his work. In general, Drissi’s work has been described by art historians and his peers as a social commentary rather than an overtly political critique.
Formal Analysis
Drissi worked across multiple mediums, including painting, sculpture, and engraving. In the 1970s, Drissi veered more towards abstracted figuration. Drissi began depicting figures, often androgynous, in his signature style, which included enlarged or missing eyes, elongated or amputated limbs, exaggerated hands and feet, and haunted expressions of anxiety or anguish. Like his contemporary Aziz Abou Ali, who also studied in Tetouan and died tragically at a young age in Madrid, Drissi’s work often depicted what Jean François Clément called “corporal mutilations.” His subjects reflected the culture of accusation, humiliation, repression, and submission in which he lived at the time. In his work, he hardly referenced a particular time or place, rather, he chose to reflect on the idea of universal suffering. It is argued that the German Expressionist groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter influenced Drissi, alongside artists such as Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Otto Dix, who, like Drissi, were preoccupied with the universal human condition, tragedy, and even death.
In his work, Drissi often explored taboo subject matter, including nude women and sex work. He also explored the overconsumption of alcohol in his bar scenes. According to the artist's family and friends, Drissi preferred being with “everyday folks” and societal outcasts rather than engaging in intellectual discourse. While in Tangier, he gained firsthand experience of the city’s nightlife culture and translated it into his work. Other paintings appear dreamlike and explore macabre subject matter. For example, in the 1985 oil on canvas painting La Fuite (The Escape), a skeleton appears to be riding a horse, bodies are being trampled on the floor, and other nude figures express varying levels of shock, fear, and discomfort. The artist also moved beyond painting on canvas to create engravings and sculptures. In many of his sculptures, Drissi used everyday objects such as shovels. In Cuca, from 1986, three shovels were transformed into human heads with bulging eyes and protruding lifelike noses; the shafts of the shovels were stand-ins for bodies. Aside from shovels, Drissi often incorporated instruments in his artwork that he borrowed from his wife’s grandmother’s music shop in Tangier. His bold colour palettes starkly contrast the dark mood and subject matter found in his oeuvre.
