Montresso Foundation at Jardin Rouge introduces a trio exhibition in its still-fresh exhibition space here just outside Marrakesh.  The three French speakers (two from France, one from Morocco) have a certain taste for fooling with modern cultural touchstones, each bended or blending original meanings to reflect the chaotic modern age often seen in street culture.

A haven for a be-jewelled collection of old-school graffiti writers and street artists and those simply absorbed with a family of “urban” aesthetics, Jardin Rouge has often mentored many of these self-taught artists in the professional practices of a modern artist. With the exhibition XXL they take these loosely related three in a direction toward museum exhibition and perhaps institutional recognition in the future.

Tangier-born Moroccan Mohamed Said Chair hasn’t hit 30 but has already jumped from a career in finance to a career in art like a superhero. With gallery exhibitions to organizing group shows, he’s managing the professional side as well as the technical and aesthetic.  

Here his realistic folding of chiascuro technique with overbloated superheroes turns comic. A critique perhaps of Millenial star worship, here his anonymous consumers and porcine figures lie haplessly in costume, but not in reverie.

Globetrotter POES was born in Paris and lives in Lyon, a product of hiphop, the simplicity of 80s-90s cartoons, and his own explorations of Mesopotamian/ Sumerian, Greek, Roman traditions.  Here his mythologies freely borrow from historical works and contemporary pop to create stinging rebukes of the arms industry and various forms of political skullduggery.

An abstract expressionist with punk roots and a doodlers aesthetic, Skunkdog prizes the piling up of paint and sculptural materials to make canvasses appear tactile and 3-D.  Each thought collides in a colorful hazard, sometimes resulting in unfettered madness, other times a low-fi feral and effervescent folk mud.  Anti-symmetric, the energy comes from the alchemy.

XXL

MOHAMED SAÏD CHAIR, POES and SKUNKDOG

Montresso* Art Space Marrakech, Morocco

From April 20 to June 30, 2019

Visits by appointment on Fridays and Saturdays at info@montresso.com