Must See: Laïla Mestari’s Portraits et contenants

Laïla Mestari, Un mouvement partiellement contenu, 2024. Coloured pencil on paper, marquetry (44 x 57, framed). Photo courtesy of Patel Brown Gallery.

My favourite piece in Laïla Mestari’s eclectic, awe-inspiring exhibition Portraits et contenants (Portraits and containers in English) is the dreamscape-y drawing called Le retour des légendes (The return of legends). It depicts a woman in a curling back bend motion, whose one red-gloved hand – the texture of which is astoundingly convincing in its velvety-ness – holds on to the top of a ghostly tree stump. The figure’s face and body have a sprawl of vegetal shadows stretching across her skin, and leaves spill from out of her fiery mane as she brushes it. On her chin sits someone in repose in a fold-out lawn chair, and off to one side, her blue dress transforms into a churning sea on which boats and passengers can be seen.  

Combining elements of Surrealism with exceptionally executed portraiture, the piece epitomizes the core themes and approaches that crop up throughout Mestari’s wide-ranging expressions. The Moroccan-born, Montréal-based interdisciplinary artist incorporates textile work, drawing, video and print media into an exhilarating oeuvre that probes and connects elements of personal and world histories, humanity’s connection to the land, and the effects of displacement and colonization.

“The idea of cultural identity is central to my practice,” Mestari says. “I'm part of the Maghrebian diaspora and I grew up in Québec, and through my work, I’m finding my voice in between those different cultures.”

Laïla Mestari, Le retour des légendes, 2024. Coloured pencil on paper, marquetry (34 x 40 inches, framed). Photo courtesy of Patel Brown Gallery.

The contenants aspect of the show is imbued with multiple meanings, both literal and metaphorical. The figures Mestari delineates, for example – all of whom she says are composites of real and imagined people who act as “vessels” for her narratives – are often contorted into shapes that exemplify the strain that folks in diasporic communities experience in having to acclimatize to their new surroundings. Her “characters” also transmogrify, or have uncanny elements imposed upon them by Mestari’s hand, to implicate and explore other topics of interest.

“Trees are very strong symbols for me,” Mestari says when I ask about the meaning of the stump in Le retour des légendes (throughout this show you can catch glimpses of various types of plant life; and the custom wooden frames for her drawings are also devastatingly gorgeous). “I always think about people who have been uprooted, and have had their culture uprooted. But trees can also mean the hope for re-rooting.” She notes that the stump stands in for a disconnection with nature, but that the crimsoned-gloved clutch her character has on it represents “an intimate connection between our bodies and the land.”

Such poetic resonance is imparted by all the pieces in Portraits et contenants, which features an array of drawings in a similarly psychedelic vein to Le retour des légendes, as well as textile works, black and white collages, and the hypnotic offering called A bridge. It’s a video piece Mestari made in 2022, projected on to a slanted wooden structure that at once signifies a home and the arduousness of cultural hybridity. That burden is particularly present as the wooden plank Mestari herself is placed upon while performing a yogic Bridge Pose creaks gently as it floats on a body of water.

Laïla Mestari, A bridge, 2022. Video projection on wood and fabric (72 x 56 x 4 inches). Photo courtesy of Patel Brown Gallery.

“It's about the many people who are in between two places and two cultures,” she says of the quietly powerful piece. “In this circumstance, the self becomes a bridge between here and elsewhere, and between the past and the present. There’s also a sense of being the bridge between self and community – I feel like so much of my ideas are about bridging things together.”

This is especially clear in the way Mestari unifies the traditional with the modern, and a wonderful example is found in the drawing Un mouvement partiellement contenu (A partially contained movement). In one part of the piece, we see a throng of people on horseback representing the Muslim population’s expulsion from Spain led by Christians during The Crusades; they flow out from the recognizable form of a walk-through metal detector, somehow passing from one era to another by way of Mestari’s intervention.

There’s a robust sense of activity conveyed across this piece, with each of its vignettes begging for our attention. My eye is most drawn, however, to what one of Mestari’s signature twined figures rendered in this work is wearing. Her body composed in a type of Arabesque gesture, part of her outfit is an exquisitely articulated pair of trousers.

Laïla Mestari, Opacity dress, 2024. Textile construction, LCD screens (49 x 57 x 25 inches). Photo courtesy of Patel Brown Gallery.

“I really have fun inventing garments for my characters,” Mestari enthuses, divulging that the look derives inspiration from decorative Spanish garments like the kind worn by matadors. “I studied a bit of fashion history while doing my MFA, and I found it's so fascinating how clothing carries so much information about history. I’m looking at textiles as being a container for culture and also, physically, the resilience of textiles throughout time, and how they hold the body.”

A stunning precedent of this notion is found in Mestari’s Opacity Dress, a mind-bendingly rich amalgam of materials from tufts of a delicate lace given to Mesteri by her mother, to a fun fur hair scrunchie. The outermost edges of the garment are marked with the presence of perforations that allow a series of video captures of Mestari’s eyes to peer through.

With a silhouette based on the Djellaba, a garment worn in the Maghreb region of North Africa, Mestari says that she sees this recent work as being like “two paintings, the front and the back, that are made with textiles as the palette instead of paint. The different textures become an ecosystem of ideas that meet each other – sometimes with harmony, sometimes in dissonance. This is how I feel about identity; that it’s a constant tension between chaos and order, and between symbols and abstraction.”

Laïla Mestari, Contenant #6, 2023. Archival inkjet print (32 x 30½ inches) Photo courtesy of Patel Brown Gallery.

Speaking of symbols: Running down the front of the dress is a monochromatic print of an image of braided hair – another motif that bounds through Mestari’s show. But not just braided hair; sometimes we see a swath of curls protrude from a drawn face, as we do in the collage work Contenant #2 (Container #2).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the use of hair in art, specifically work made by Black artists, and have plans to write a story about the topic soon. I mention this to Mestari, who tells me that again, each strand’s significance is far-reaching for her.

“Hair symbolizes an important ritual for me,” she says. “And it’s a ritual shared between me and other women in my family. I have memories of my mother, my aunts, and my cousins brushing my hair. There’s a sense of connection there. And at the same time, hair is a big part of identity. It carries the genes of my grandmother, and I feel connected to her and my ancestors through my hair.”

She adds: “In Moroccan culture, women's hair is a very charged subject in regard to religious beliefs, but also in terms of aesthetic traditions and expectations" – again illustrating how her singular containers can hold many ideas at once. And we are all lucky to be able to witness how Mestari makes them tangible.

Portraits et contenants is on until July 27th at Patel Brown Gallery Toronto.