Paraboles, la rétrospective

La Galerie 38 in Casablanca opens a retrospective of Mohamed Mourabiti on 15 October 2026. The painter, born in Marrakech in 1968, makes mixed-media works on canvas and wood. He builds their surfaces from earth, tar, pigment, fabric and collage, laid down in layers and then scraped back. The selection runs from 1988 to 2026, from small ink drawings on paper to canvases more than four metres long.

Mourabiti starts from places he knows. The satellite dishes crowding the rooftops of Marrakech were among his first subjects, and he returned to them until they became a sign of their own. Other forms taken from the landscape followed: the koubba, the mausoleum, the circle and the map. Each began as something observed and lost its descriptive role over the years. His palette keeps to the same ground, with the black of tar, the ochre of Marrakech and the white of the Atlas peaks.

A journey to Damascus, where he visited the tomb of the Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi, shaped the paintings that followed. In the series Sur les traces d'Ibn Arabî, a dark rectangular block hovers against open sky. The writer Edmond Amran El Maleh, who wrote several texts on Mourabiti, saw each of these canvases as one more attempt at an ideal tomb. The latest works return to the circle, including tondi that carry the map of Africa. Elsewhere, scraps of flyers and newspapers marking streets in Marrakech, Paris, London, Dubai or São Paulo are pasted into the paint.

The gallery has published a catalogue, Paraboles, la rétrospective, introduced by Jean-Noël Pancrazi, with texts by Michel Butor, Abdelhak Serhane, Mahi Binebine and others. Among the recent large formats it reproduces is an untitled canvas from 2023, measuring 150 by 250 cm. Mourabiti is self-taught and lives in Tahannaout, where he founded the art space Al Maqam. It works as a garden, literary salon, residency and gallery, and has received Adonis, Butor and Dia Azzawi. No closing date has been announced.