Rabat – The exhibit combines Laabi’s paintings and poetry as a marriage of words and images.
Laabi joins the “literati” ideal of poetry and the ecstasy of the image to create masterpieces. Laabi’s poetry gives a voice to his paintings and the paintings display Laabi’s poetic words. Most of Laabi’s poems inspire his painting.
Abdellatif Laabi is a prize-winning Moroccan poet who received the prestigious French Goncourt Prize for poetry in 2009 and the French Academy’s Grand prix de la Francophonie in 2011.
On painting, Laabi has said, “I observed many painters, saw them during their work, I sat on contemplating the way they worked, and sometimes wrote about their works; the art of painting became familiar and intimate to me, and in a very short time, I began to paint whenever I could, daily and for several hours.”
On what inspires him, Laabi writes in “My Story with Painting” that “Mankind is always reborn as one gradually discovers his or her different selves and multifaceted aspects through the unexpected encounters, the emotions, the mutations we experience, and the danger we face.”
Laabi, a major figure in Moroccan culture, is a prolific artist, poet, novelist, playwright, and translator.
