Safi – Mohamed Fathallah Achour will open “Les Couleurs du Maroc” (The Colors of Morocco) at the Russian House in Rabat on July 15, presenting a 10-meter-long naive painting, as the exhibition opens at 6 p.m.
The exhibition is part of the 13th “Russian and Moroccan Palette” festival, which runs from July 1-29, bringing together Moroccan and Russian artists through a diverse program spanning classical painting and contemporary experimentation.
From the railways to the easel
Born in Rabat in 1955, Achour left school at an early age before joining Morocco’s national railway operator, ONCF, where he worked as a ticket controller for 21 years.
The profession took him across the country, allowing him to discover its landscapes, colors, and changing scenery region by region.
Later, he was transferred to the railway’s printing department, which kept him surrounded by ink.
After taking early retirement in 1998, Achour decided to dedicate himself entirely to painting. That same year, he held his first exhibition at the French Cultural Center in Rabat before moving to Marseille, where he joined the Arc-en-Ciel Painters Association and studied plastic arts for the first time.
This was the beginning of more exhibitions that followed in La Ciotat and Miramas, where he received several distinctions.
Since then, his work has been showcased in more than one hundred exhibitions in Morocco and abroad.
The school of modern naive art
Achour describes his artistic approach as modern naive art, building his compositions through simple geometric forms spanning squares, rectangles, triangles and circles while working with a palette of nearly 500 colors. His goal is to reinterpret Morocco’s popular artistic heritage through a contemporary lens.
Warm tones dominate his canvases, while expressive faces frequently appear throughout his work.
But his passion for drawing began long before painting became his profession.
