Khayachi and the nude
‘The art of drawing allows a better grasp of the mysteries of painting.’
Noureddine Khayachi
Khayachi was passionately interested in the geography of the human figure, which in its perfection symbolised the mysterious, mystic origin of creation. The female nude inspired some magnificent sketches. “Meditating Nude” strips naked not just the model but Khayachi himself in all his delicate sensuality. And the pastel sketch itself is enchanting, one of Khayachi’s best achievements, a work of beauty, power, mystery, light, darkness, contrast, seductivity and grace.
Naked or clothed, women are at the heart of his work. Deprived early in his childhood of his mother, he took his revenge on life by giving women prime place in his pictures. They are the key to Khayachi’s universe.
Khayachi painted the nude in every medium, obsessively: in oils, with the palette knife, charcoal, red pencil, pencil, crayon, watercolour and the engraving technique. The nude was celebrated via women veiled and unveiled, women as mothers, and women as women.
Unlike the pictures whose symbols and exuberance show traditional women at their tasks, the nudes emphasise the magnificent beauty of women by the stripped-bare technique of drawing, the canvas stripping down with the women, the artist throwing off his finery like his model. Khayachi then notices the rhythm of the body, the way it moves in space, its sensuality and its human identity. Each body illustrates the moment of truth, an instant of beauty caught by the artist’s gaze.
Khayachi works like a magician, suggesting their lives with a brushstroke, and giving them life. The study of the nude involves many techniques which helped Khayachi widen his appreciation of the visible. He developed an artistic personality which became constantly richer with every new sensation and every new emotion he experienced.
He ceased for a time to observe Tunisia with respect and started looking at it with sensuality. The nudes helped him to find a spontaneity, a freshness, a lack of unnecessary ornamentation that was highly liberating. He put his model at ease and extracted the emotional shock that would end up as a drawing or a painting. The poses are subtle, the observation delicate: breasts, thighs, buttocks and other parts of the body are rendered almost as sculpture. His sense of proportion is perfect; the result is extremely harmonious. The model gives of herself, her truth, her beauty and Khayachi is able to recreate the world, recreating human beauty.The model is queen of a universe where she is always the muse and Khayachi responds as worshipper of the eternal female, with paintings which are among the loveliest and most moving of his works.
‘Never was naked beauty…presented…with such seductive charm.’
Noureddine Khayachi
‘Looking at her, our eyes are as if drunken. They follow the line that charts the form of her miraculous body…Once let this line, with its swellings and its withdrawals, its surgings and slackenings, become alive in us and we feel ourselves taken over by a sense of profound delight…What grace, what vigour…How this young body lives, quivers, shivers, sings and vibrates! This is woman at the height of her power. She is young and we can guess that she possesses a formidable force. She seems peaceful and serene, but at heart she is a tiger at rest.’
Noureddine Khayachi
