We, the Wanderers—Featured Artist El Mehdi Largo

“I had to leave Italy to become Italian,” artist El Mehdi Largo says, while heating up some water for tea. “And when I arrived in France, I suddenly became an Arab.” He opens a tea bag and puts it in a cup. “But I am Moroccan, it’s a bit more complicated.” He pours the water into the cup. “What I am, what I claim to be, means little compared to what the other assigns me to be,” he said, passing me the steaming tea.

We could use a hot cup of tea on what is a cold, damp day in a quiet neighborhood in the outskirts of Paris, where Mehdi has his studio, in which his artworks and collected objects accumulate. On a shelf, there is a figurine of Pope Francis — “He was a good one!” Mehdi noted, making its head bounce — but also books, prints, and two life jackets that are part of a series, decorated respectively by a prayer mat and Jewish fabric. “I order them online, on Amazon,” he explained. “I received them in my mailbox. Until that moment, they’re just objects. It’s only when I place them on the floor that they take on a sacred dimension. Before that, they’re nothing but things.”

Not far from the life jackets, there is one piece on which Mehdi is currently working, for the collective show Between the Silences, We Weave at Galerie L’Instantanée, in Paris’s 12th arrondissement. Organized by the collective Jeunesses et Mémoires Franco-Algériennes (JMFA), the show is meant to probe intimate and collective narratives of belonging and exile.

The new work, an installation he is sewing into reality, is inspired by baroque stoups in Malta and decorations in Christian churches. The register is similar to that of a previous series titled Je suis l’Immaculée Conception, which holds a duality both in its imaginary of reference and in the choice of materials: marble becomes plastic, and the figure of the Virgin Mary evokes women’s genitalia in what is not at all an attempt at desacralization, but quite the contrary: the unveiling of an interconnectedness of all things, an intermingling of the highbrow and the lowbrow, of the sacred reliquary and the consumeristic object.

“Marketing reenacts the idols. It chews them for us, makes us consume them,” he says, pointing at one detail in the artwork: two Nike swooshes, which together composed a sacred heart. “Adidas’s logo turns into the laurels of a Greek god, and Mercedes — which means divine grace — sells me a car!” He pauses for a millisecond before continuing, “Whether it’s God’s light or the light coming from my phone, it all goes through the retina. And what I see is pure interpretation. Or pure projection.”

The alter ego of my damnation

Projection is a good word to describe the artist’s research. A big component of his work is the tackling of the projections of the Western world onto the “Orient,” something that touches him quite personally. Born in Morocco, where he lived until he was seven years old, Mehdi was raised in the ultra-racist northern Italy of the late ‘90s and early 2000s; he arrived in France at seventeen. During his wandering, art was part of the process of identification.

“I always drew, to buy myself some dignity,” he recalls. “I’d show my drawings to the other kids, they’d say, Mehdi’s beautiful drawings, and suddenly I wasn’t the marrocchino anymore.” One day, as a teenager, he walked into an art workshop asking for an internship. “I lied, said I wanted to do commercial graphics. They saw my work and subscribed me to art school. Two weeks later, I was taking the entrance exam.” He was eighteen, and he felt bad about asking his parents for the entrance fee, which would be a sacrifice for them at the time. “But my parents said that it was destiny. Something wanted things to happen that way,” he says.

While his practice these days looks more like art installation, he went back to drawing for a series called Colombes Grises (Gray Doves). “At a time I was working in retail, everybody around me completely identified with the brand they were working for, in a brand-based social ladder of sorts” he recalls. “The guy who worked at Gucci felt like he could look down on someone who worked for Zara… I looked at them as pigeons trying to scrounge a little and try to climb over the others.”

One day, he said, he was sitting with a friend smoking, and she sees a white pigeon. She goes, “Oh, the beautiful dove.” “I found myself thinking that the white pigeon and the dove, genetically, are the same. It’s just the word and our conception that changes everything.” In each drawing of the birds, the style, the line, drastically change depending on his moods, or whether he was in a hurry or not. “I thought about the representation of the Holy Spirit as a dove, carrying a part of god’s spirit to each person, suggesting that in this way, god is as human as we are. Perhaps, in the end, each of us was born from a specific mood of god.”

In his peregrinations across the two shores of the Mediterranean, some of his friends have likened him to a Corto Maltese of sorts. Looking at his profile, there is something there, as well as in the lean figure and the cut of his high waist pants, and tight jacket. But he wouldn’t be the ethereal Hugo Pratt version of Corto. Rather, he could resemble the recent version drawn by comic book artist Bastien Vives, a Y2K Corto of sorts.

However, in the pop culture imaginary, it is not really a sailor that the artist elected as his alter ego, but the cowboy. In his artistic practice, he created the Muslim Cowboy, a character he impersonated as an avatar of a certain projection of masculinity and a mirror of western propaganda of the Arab and Muslim world. “The Muslim Cowboy is the cowboy of my dignity,” he says with a half-smile. “He’s the one who says: screw you. You want to play? Let’s play by your rules.”

The figure, which appears in different video and photography works by the artist, was born from a blend of American westerns, Orientalist depictions of Arabs as sexually dangerous figures, and figures of anti-colonial struggles. He was inspired by Abdelkrim El Khattabi, the Rifian leader who fought the Spanish in the 1920s. “With three thousand men, he kicked the shit out of fifteen thousand Spaniards.” From that epic, the horseman seen as a savage by the colonial gaze becomes here the cowboy, an emblem of resistance, but also a carrier of cultural stereotypes.

In the series he created around the Muslim Cowboy, he deconstructs the different ideas of the Arab as it has been forged by Hollywood over the years. “When the native defends himself, he’s barbaric; when he’s calm in his forest, he’s a cute little savage that needs educating.” Mehdi recalls the documentary Reel Bad Arabs, which traced this evolution: “It’s a relief when you find something that confirms that your thinking was right all along!” He laughs. For the artist, politics is always a symptom. His work begins in the personal and radiates toward the collective. In his video 82, he films his grandmother as he approaches the subject of death. “At that time, eighty-two people existed thanks to her.” The making of that artwork had him reflecting on xenophobia as the fear people have of the “other,” as the fear for one’s own heritage. “I sort of understand racism better if I put it into this framework. It goes back to a question of sexuality. Although, when we think of heritage, ultimately the world I grew up in is already gone; the future resembles me even less.

Everything in Mehdi’s work orbits around this constant dialogue between spirit and flesh. He rejects no religion but traverses them all in pursuit of a spirituality without icons. “What betrayed Christianity was perhaps the creation of icons,” he reflects. “An image can always be replaced by another. In Islamic art, God hides within geometry.”

Just four lads walking

This quest emerges from one of Mehdi’s installations that principally deals with this question of heritage, as well as with the existential struggle that ties humanity together. The work “Et moi j’etais exactment ici!” consists of a box into which the viewer can put their head to look at a gilded space, reminiscent of baroque ceilings, in which two mirrors create a mesmerizing illusion of depth and symmetry. Inside the box is a photograph: the artist’s father, at the time when he used to sell cigarettes in Turin.

“Back in 2012, I went to Turin, in the same place where my father used to sell cigarettes. I’d found the very place where he hid his cigarettes, I took a picture there, and brought it back to him. He turned them in his hands and said: ‘I was exactly here.’”

The piece was originally conceived for an exhibition called Italians in Paris. It marked the first time the artist questioned the fact that he had to come to Paris to be recognized as Italian. The curatorial text for the show referenced the metaphysical painter De Chirico. In his explorations around Turin, Mehdi started to trace not only his father’s steps, but also the parallel journey of De Chirico, who, in his own wanderings, was deeply inspired by another figure who famously resided in Turin: Nietzsche.

“De Chirico went there, in a way, searching for Nietzsche. He said in interviews that he could feel what Nietzsche felt. And I thought, damn, that’s funny! … It’s this idea of searching, of returning to places, a quest for meaning. Because really, we — immigrants, wanderers — following the setting sun into exile, we are the ultimate seekers of meaning. We are philosophers bound to matter, putting it into practice out of urgency, out of hunger for knowledge. The philosopher takes his time; the artist, the true artist, is also in that search.

“And all these labels, immigrant, artist, philosopher, son of an immigrant, are only statuses we or society stick on to try to exist somehow. But before anything else, we are nothing but flesh walking. Flesh that cannot understand why it walks, why it is conscious of itself, why it looks at itself in a mirror. And in that gaze, it realizes it exists. And I, son of an immigrant, artist, I think of us four, walking. Just four lads, walking.”

El Mehdi Largo, born in 1992 in Mohammedia, Morocco, is an artist who divides his time between Paris and Mansouria, Morocco. He graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans and, in need of a studio, posed as a student to spend two years at the Beaux-Arts de Paris until 2020. His sharp and reality-rooted approach encompasses photography, video, installation, and textiles.

Through his art, El Mehdi explores themes like strangeness, life, and death, shaped by the five languages that have influenced his worldview in Italy, France, and his native Morocco. In 2020, he was selected for the Jeune Création exhibition at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Pantin and participated in major exhibitions such as Transport commun at the Société Générale headquarters. His international presence has grown through fairs like Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Menart Fair, and 1-54 Marrakech.

Recently, driven by a desire to make culture more accessible and engage with his community, Largo founded Dar El Warata, an artistic residency in his grandmother’s village.
His solo exhibitions include La mascarade du chemin du mauvais sous la rose at Cabanne Georgina in Marseille (2023), Dada at Le Consulat Voltaire in Paris (2021), Colombes grises at Galerie Jeune Création in Romainville (2020), Take Over MACAAL in Marrakech (2019), Fils de Harrag at Lycée Yourcenar in Le Mans (2016), and Tandem at Galerie du CROUS in Paris (2016). He has also been featured in publications like Artaïs Contemporary Art and Brut Afrique.