ARTISTEMonia Touiss

Natures
Abstract,
the journey of a lifetime…

Becoming a painter perhaps means beginning, at every moment, to traverse the history of art and that of painting.
Quand on fait ses classes, comme Monia Touiss, aux Beaux-Arts de Tétouan, sa première école est d’abord celle de l’académisme.

Initially conceived as a propaedeutic to the Spanish Schools of Fine Arts, the School of Fine Arts of Tetouan – which would become a year later
Monia Touiss eut obtenu son diplôme en 1992, Institut National –, transmet un enseignement canonique, dans l’esprit de son fondateur Mariano Bertuchi. Dessin d’après modèles, connaissance des justes proportions, mais surtout apprentissage empirique de la peinture en extérieur, sur le motif. Avant d’adopter l’abstraction lyrique et le genre du portrait auxquels on associe volontiers aujourd’hui son travail,l’artiste commence par peindre des paysages, d’après nature. L’observation est derigueur.

Constant attention is required. Tetouan is a mountainous city, subject to climatic hazards.

The landscape is constantly evolving. We are undoubtedly close to what Chinese painter-calligraphers designate by the two ideograms evoking a "water-mountain" whose transformations are incessant. Two approaches to the landscape can be distinguished here: one Western, in the lineage of the Renaissance, would conceive it as a space offered to visual perception only asking to be isolated then captured by the painter's eye;

the other, more Far Eastern, would be perceived in terms of interactions between different antagonistic elements.

For anyone who has found themselves in the heart of a storm or a thunderstorm, for anyone who has seen rain pouring down in the middle of a clear sky, it is easy to understand that so-called landscape painting often misses these sudden changes of perspective.

We must then imagine our painter, meditative. Her mind is formed by the canons of a Western aesthetic, but her heart seems to be grappling with a whirlwind of contradictory sensations.

No matter, from now on she will paint less from nature than by drawing on the sensation that the landscape arouses in her.

This sensation of silent transformations at work in the landscape is found in most of Monia Touiss's paintings, which could be described as abstract, even though this shortcut ignores what is at stake in a painting that in no way abstracts from reality, but remains attentive to its effects and repercussions.