Mohamed Saïd Chair is a young Moroccan painter whose work is characterized by characters “put in a box”. Indeed, in 2015 during a walk, he is attracted by children carrying on their heads cardboard boxes in the shape of a face. It’s the click. Echo of this famous expression “put someone in a box” which evokes a state of immobility more than a movement. A person is put in a box, it is frozen and can not move. It’s actually a metaphor for talking about someone who can not replicate or get by. It is also a reference to this need to be classified in a certain “normality”, a homogeneous reality.
Mohamed Said Chair covers the heads of his characters with a cardboard box and manages to capture ordinary scenes of life reflecting human decadence. On cardboard replacing the canvas “a perverse social order produces individuals of the same standard, rather than real people with disparate characters”. These characters are icons of consumption and “mass conditioning”.
In his new work, in the face of our anxieties and our fears, even the superheroes can not save us. Embodying our aspirations, our dreams, these idols of a new genre are no more. Indeed, these fantasies, heroes of a damaged world slip into decadence. Mohamed Said Chair challenges the lack of poetry and humanity engendered in our contemporary individualistic societies. These heroes are as lost as us. The painter appropriates symbols by presenting their most intimate face putting down the archetypes. As if, in the world in which we live, where all values are in crisis, it was no longer possible to believe in postulates of altruism. Mohamed desecrates them, going hand in hand with a process of mythologization of Monsieur and Madame Tout-le-Monde. The dream breaks up.
Heroes of our collective memory, these hybridizations produce no feeling. These characters are neutral but the truth is there. Mohamed shows the muscles, the piles of fat and bumps. He undresses these heroes little by little, seen as beasts at rest.
“The hero is a cure for the natural weakness of children, the rational injury of adults or the historical humiliation of a nation. Drunk paradise, heroic happiness – Boris Cyrulnik
Article by Severine Grosjean
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
