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- In the firmament of the sky, a comet. A bright star, an elliptic-shaped orbit that revolves around the Sun before melting into cosmic galaxies.

- A star that will illuminate, from time to time, the sky of this life that challenges time, space, norms and conveniences.

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- A life that blooms in Jorf El-Maleh, close to Sidi Kacem, in 1930, to simply go and die away in the anonymity of this Parisian fog,

- one morning in May 1971, on a public bench.

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- For every painting, Henri Matisse wrote, I put my life at risk.

- As for him, Djilali Garbaoui quite simply wasted his to leave a work,

- some parts of which are still lost to date.

- And silence wraps itself again into moments of this short life

- dedicated to the conquest of art, of the beautiful, and of calm that the artist will only reach through the pains of suffering, distress and solitude.

- Even if he was surrounded by most valuable friendships as the one shown by Mohammed El-Melihi, Farid Belkehia, Miloud,

- Kamel Zebdi, Driss El-Jai or even Ahmed Sefrioui,

- Djilali Garbaoui, will live in solitary in the shadows of the latter,

- and of his anguishes that he however fed as they enabled him to substract himself to his will.

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- In his retreats, such as the one when he stayed in the ancient town of the Shellah area,

- he draws on the twists and turns of his imagination, this essence that in this way allows him to vanquish the torments that eat him away and obsess his ego, his self.

- And painting is his refuge and his paintings are his shelter. A welcoming land where movement and body language sometimes appear,

- maybe often, in deafening movements of light and violence.

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- I started with abstract painting as early as 1952, he said in an interview for the journal “Souffle”, in 1967.

- Back in Morocco, I felt that it was necessary to withdraw from our geometrical traditions to do lively painting, to give energy to the painting, a sense of rhythm,

- and most of all as for me, to find the light.

- The quest for light is crucial to me.

- Light never cheats. It washes our eyes. A bright painting lights us.

- In a conversational interview with Gilbert Michel, Garbaoui affirms one more time the meaning of this quest.

- A painter always keeps the mark of his origins. Look at Picasso. I carry my Moroccan land inside.

- It can be found in my colours. When I exhibited with Michaux at the Modern Art museum,

- we were very different from one another, I was much closer to the land than he was.

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- The others said: “To us who keep confined to our studios, you bring something invigorating”.

- This affection for Morocco, for its authenticity, as expressed by Garbaoui, surely finds an echo as for the choice of the place of the exhibition.

- Double abstraction, organised in Darr Mrini in the Medina of Rabat by the French Institute of the town.

- It is in this place that Fouad Bellamine, curator of the exhibition,

- was keen to paying a tribute to Garbaoui, the man, the artist and his work.

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- Garbaoui’ swork of art, we know full well that one of the most specific features of this work,

- is first of all an outright automatic personal writing, a work that cannot be separated from the character and save the character’s life,

- we know full well how Garbaoui lived and how he died ;

- a work that can be said to be a founding work in relation to abstract painting save Moroccan painting.

- A work that is still young, still present, even still topical let’s say. So a set of things like that pushed me to have artists rotating

- or to pick artists that lived, whom he may have been acquainted with, or who had identical concerns at the same time that is during the 50s and 60s.

- Leaning thus on Gharbaoui’s work, the exhibition “double abstraction” locates more or less through many painters’ work

- such as Jean Degottex, Shirley Jaffe or Jean-Paul Riopelle,

- the complementarity in the differences of a movement, an artistic phenomenon, born in the beginning of the 20th century to evolve into quiet different shapes and frameworks.

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- Concerning the artists chosen by myself, they are artists that question in fact the space of painting within itself.

- That is to say is this painting?

- Are tint areas of paint painting?

- Is it inside the frame? Is it outside the frame? How does it work in respect to space?

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- All the artists that work with these tools and this practical application about the use of color,

- the use of materials that seem to be materials for painting and that are not but that rightly question painting,

- I can think of Jean-Pierre Bertrand, of Kees Visser who ask about the covering of the canvas, the covering of the paper,

- when the more you cover, the more the thickness of the painting turns into something else, and opens a window instead of shutting it,

- and implements and exhibits itself only in a space and in respect to this space, and this question of the hanging of the paint

- is a fully inner element to its work and re-interrogated each time. That is to say that there is not only one way to hang the work he created.

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- Moroccan pictorial landscape since Garbaoui's adventure grew richer with the experience of a entire generation of painters.

- Fouad Lamine, Kacimi, Nabili, Cherkaoui, Bouregba, to quote only those who capitalized processes, shapes and figures,

- to inscribe the artistic phenomenon into a rising curve that crystallizes it in its extent as a real Moroccan pictorial movement.

- The different operators of this movement draw their sources from traditional meanings.

- The main issue for each one of these individualities will be the conquest of this flat surface, immediate,

- into which pigments, colours, will join more blurred geometrical shapes, shapeless silhouettes or also the unreal expression of something concrete and palpable.

- Moroccan painters because I think that... We have not lived first of all, we do not have a pictorial history, in the Western sense of term.

- We have a plastic art history that has been going on for a few thousand years old, be it Arabic or Berber,

- but in the sense of the frame, in brief, of the easel painting, we only have an extremely short history,

- dating back to a maximum of five or six decades, so to talk about school or movement is even a bit inappropriate,

- moreover because at the time being, in the world, we do not talk about school anymore, that is a phenomenon from the beginning of the century,

- Paris School, Berlin School, all that is a little bit over. So I think that what matters is that there is now a reality as I said a moment ago,

- a Moroccan plastic reality, there are extremely strong individualities and as a consequence it is possible to talk about Moroccan painting.

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