Mohammed Hashas - AlJazeeraTalk - Oujda, Morocco
 When the Polish/French figurative artist Balthazar Klossowski de Rola (1908-2001) said ‘painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language,’ he was right.
My admiration and full respect for self-made artists was fuelled when I visited the exposition of art Oujda American Corner organized on 28-29 March, 2008. Two artists participated in this exposition: Mr Abderahmane Zenati and Mrs Nouria Boukhnifrate.
After having made a tour around the exposed paintings in the room, I asked the director of the center, Mr Mohamed Bendaha, about the painter – because at first I thought it was just one! He asked me if I am not acquainted especially with this name: Abderrahmane Zennati, a Oujdi international painter. ‘Ah, sorry, I never heard about him,’ I said. ‘He is a painter, a writer, and a lover of music and theatre. He is a renowned artist,’ the director who guided me in a second, more scrutinizing tour, told me. What is of interest in all this is that the artist is from Oujda, from the region, but I never knew him, and sure not many know him still.
Before I focus my talk on Zennati, let me say few words about Boukhnifrate, (pic1. Director Mr Bendaha on the left opening the exposition, Mr Zennati in the middle, and Mrs Boukhnifrate on the right side).
Boukhnifrate: Painting the Nomadic-Harem Life
Mrs Bouknifrate’s paintings are mostly decorative, pieces of ornaments, but they show an unrivalled skill and mastery of the brush. In addition to the feminine beauty they represent, they also seem to touch upon lost social scenes: the example of the haremic woman in the old medina (pic2) or the nomad woman (pic3)
. Her paintings also well describe the lost dimension of sightseeing and contemplation of nature
Back to Nature
Zennati: A Self-made artist
 As to Zennati’s paintings, my prime interest here, they are more mesmerizing especially when we know the social background of the artist. Zennati was born in Oujda in 1943, a hard and misery period of time in Morocco. But his family situation was worse. He was soon found orphan, vagabonding, roaming the streets to look for what to eat in dustbins. When he fell seriously ill of tuberculoses at the age of 12, he was taken to hospital, and it is there that he started his never-ending journey of painting. His artistic life began in hospital where he nurtured the habit of painting and drawing on any piece of paper he could put his hands on. It is also there that he started caring for learning, and later on writing.
 Zennati takes Oujda, his birthplace, and Saidi, an adjacent coastal city, as his inspiring spaces. Now he is know by his bleu caravan which he uses in his movements from place to place for expositions, the caravan upon which he has written in French ‘L’art qui bouge’, meaning in English, ‘Art that Moves.’ Yes, it moves; art has been his companion during his good and bad times; it lives within him; it feels him; it expresses his emotions, his ideas, his nostalgias, his aspirations, and his cultural background. That is why we find him retelling the stories of his society and his surrounding through colours (pic5-6, symphony), and movement (pic7). Along with painting goes his habit of writing. He has written a good number of books in French, some for children, and some memoirs for the mature, for the academicians and for the coming generations; they narrate past events and past tales that make the memory of an artist, and generally add to the collective memory of his society. Zennati tries to give life to a past that is no more. He is a voice from the margin to the world around him, and by margin I mean the hidden memory that is not lived by many.
Zennati’s language is his painting, his pen is his brush, his colours are his ideas, and his ‘art that moves’ is his motto as an artist; his art moves and among the movements made are those that headed to France and Germany which have painted his self-made Moroccan portrait with international colours. With his moving art, his art moves.
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