Contemporary Morocco by Yto Barrada

When the American art critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) stated in 1959 that a good work of art could be captured in one glance, artist Frank Stella (1936) came up with the ultimate elaboration of that ideal. He made a series Black Paintings, which stood out in their simplicity and lack of drama: they were lines on black surfaces. Stella turned the art world upside down, was seen as the ultimate minimalist and summarized his work as “what you see is what you see”.

That’s an unusual view these days: we now know that everyone takes their own view – and if you look around you, you see that everything is coloured, as K. Schippers wrote during the same period that Stella theorized about the neutrality of black. But what about the lack of drama? How universal is the dramalessness of a painting that consists solely of lines?

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Those who watch the Morocco series that Stella made in the mid-1960s will be inclined to confirm that removing drama increases the chance of something universal. Stella abstracted to the extreme: only colors remained. A city in Morocco – Stella captured his image of Marrakech, Fez, Meknès and Rabat, among others – can indeed be portrayed without any form of drama. Take for example Marrakesh (1964) that consists of nothing more than fluorescent red and yellow lines that work together towards the center. You see what you see, and there’s little dramatic about a center – although in theory it’s always possible to think about the drama of the center (that it shouldn’t be to the side, the center that is often the deepest). point or about the pressure-increasing interest that always goes out to the center), but that’s not what Stella is about, that’s all interpretation. Stella became the master of abstract minimalism precisely because of the lack of need to hide drama in it.

bumpy path

That dramalessness does not increase the universality of a work is shown by the French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada (1971), whose first solo exhibition in the Netherlands can now be seen in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She responded to Stella in 2020 with Four Times Casablanca (Casablanca was the Moroccan city Stella had forgotten). On the first Casablanca canvas she also works towards a focal point. Where Stella worked with industrial paint, Barrada opted for natural products such as cotton and paint from plant extracts. The result is that the material entails drama: the lines are just not completely straight and the background is also not an even gray, as if the whole is a bumpy path to that middle. Because the canvas looks less industrial than Stella’s, it is emphasized that this is not a neutral surface, but that there is a history attached to it.

Barrada gives Morocco back its drama with her use of material

Barrada – who also uses her films and photos to capture contemporary Morocco and who founded the Cinémathèque de Tanger in 2006, the first art house and cultural center in North Africa – questions Stella’s abstraction. How is it possible that his work can be seen as the ultimate expression of abstract art, while these forms and structures have been present in Islamic art for centuries, she wonders. A good question, to which the answer is: a lack of knowledge of cultures other than Western. According to Barrada himself, the answer is “cultural appropriation.”

Lack of empathy

Barrada’s background is therefore completely different from Stella’s – in her earlier work she was not looking for abstraction, but she always wanted to show more than the picture, and make the viewer aware of what cannot be seen directly and the take the obvious.

In her photo project The Strait (1998), for example, she examined the Strait of Gibraltar. The narrow waterway is the border between Morocco and Europe, and besides being an escape route for many a grave. With the recent installation Tangier Island Wall (2022) Barrada also wants to show more than what can be seen: it is a project about an island off the coast of the American state of Virginia that is disappearing into the sea due to climate change.

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Lack of empathy and imagination has disastrous consequences, Barrada shows. That makes it interesting that she’s doing something with that drama-less Stella, who depicted the country Barrada grew up in in colored stripes. With the natural material, Barrada Morocco not only returns its drama, she also reinterprets Western art history. In this way she raises the originality of abstraction in the visual arts and in an effort she places Stella’s work in a different light.

After Stella is the name of the series that Barrada made – meaning both ‘inspired by’ and ‘after’ Stella. Casablanca comes in similar stripes, albeit in gray and white, on other canvases she lets the colors fade. Remarkably enough, the center of the painting is After Stella, Sunrise II, (2020) now actually at the bottom. In this work, Barrada also links color – as she often does – to the passing of time: color represents aging and decay. And as befits any color, even fluorescent ones, they fade with age. It may be that Barrada is only interested in the passage of time, but consciously or not, she also pales Stella in her reinterpretation of history.