Algerian Artist Displays Sufi Calligraphy Through “Masters of Time” in London’s October Gallery
By Febronia Hanna
Rachid Koraichi lives in both France and Tunisia. He won the Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for an art collection that exhibited seven large banners of the “Invisible Masters” series. He is well known for his calligraphy Sufi skills and is sometimes called the “Visual Sufi Master”.
He is now at London’s October Gallery, you can find a collection of artwork by the Algerian Multimedia Artist called ” The Masters Of Time”. He likens his work to a Dhikr which is a form of devotion in Sufism. He uses lines of blue and black on a white background to accentuate the details of the designs.
“Masters of Time” exhibition has 28 square panels where Koraichi explores the colour blue. His admiration for the colour blue was vibrant in his book “Eternity is the Absence of Time” as he says: “Always connected with the heavens, it is the colour of invisibility… a strange notion — perhaps — but if you look at the sea — it’s blue! Yet, cup a handful of seawater in your hand and the blue is gone!”.
As people always seem to automatically assume that artists have a message beyond their art, Koraishi admits that art doesn’t need to have a central message “I think it would be pretentious of me to claim that I’m trying to transmit any one particular message. Music, a parallel art form, can have great complexity and beauty without being ‘programmatic’ or containing any specific message. My work evidently has an aesthetic component and some of the elements I use repeatedly can be vessels for specific thoughts or meanings that I wish to communicate. But there is nothing like an overriding position or a political message. I have to allow each viewer to receive what I have done in his or her own particular way. While each person sees the same work they might well have different interpretations of its meaning.”
