In the subtle interstice that separates one place from another, something essential manifests itself: the emergence of that transformative tension between belonging and detachment that preludes the act of opening oneself to the unknown, which in turn is an inescapable premise for every authentic encounter. If the threshold – atba in Arabic – marks the boundary between what we know and what we might discover[1], the door configures itself as a symbolic diaphragm par excellence, by crossing which identity accepts to let itself be contaminated by the mystery of otherness. A universal emblem of welcome, the door also marks the separation between an inside and an outside that are potentially hostile, reminding us how every crossing implies the acceptance of the unexpected. For Mohammed El Hajoui, who grew up between Italy and Morocco, the interrogation of the threshold understood as a device of transformation is the generative core of a conceptual process which originates from his biography, nourished by the incessant reworking of his dual cultural belonging, which uses this interstitial condition as a fundamental expressive resource. These reflections are also at the center of the exhibition Finito-Atba-Infinito, his first solo show at the young research gallery Studio la Linea Verticale in Bologna.
Mohammed El Hajoui, “Finito-Atba-Infinito”, 2025, installation view, courtesy Studio la Linea Verticale, Bologna
The works on paper and canvas that welcome the visitor in the first room appear as prodigious architectures of light and void, hand-cut with a scalpel that admits no errors, following the patterns of an exponential geometric design in which mathematical rigor and the scanning of interior time converge. The abstract patterns reproduced by the artist, derived from the Islamic decorative tradition of the Maghreb and the Middle East, are never didactic quotations, but free personal rewritings, where motifs from different cultures intertwine to give form to a syncretic language. At the origin of the chromatic choices of these works we find visual impressions charged with affective valence, such as the light blue of the walls of the Moroccan houses of his childhood, the yellow of another apartment in which the artist lived, the black that guards the secret of the Islamic sanctuaries visited as a child. The virtuosic three-dimensionality of the cut thicknesses instigates the gaze to penetrate beyond the grid of those delicate interlacings and leads reasoning to question their dual status as openings and barriers. El Hajoui’s doors are extremely elegant bas-relief mirages capable of crystallizing the imminence of a crossing to be made in solitude and the sense of suspension that precedes it.
Mohammed El Hajoui, “Finito-Atba-Infinito”, 2025, installation view, courtesy Studio la Linea Verticale, Bologna
The beating heart of the exhibition is revealed in the gallery’s second room, an intimate space, comparable in this new temporary arrangement to a luminous crypt. Here the artist transforms the floor into a large ephemeral carpet made with colored powders, at the center of which a monumental door (the sculptural version of the fretwork from the first room) rises like an inaccessible monolith. The installation, titled Radici (Roots), requires an act of faith from visitors: to walk along the margins, accepting to be constrained in the tight corridor where the color has not been deposited, to graze the perimeter of the work without being able to access it, to negotiate from a distance one’s relationship with the artwork. Here El Hajoui’s work fully reveals its paradoxical and utopian nature: the perfection of the geometric patterns created by the chromatic dust, the result of hours of meticulous work and the reiteration of codified gestures like those of a ritual, finds its fulfillment precisely in the final dissolution. The powder, a poor and volatile material, is in fact destined to be progressively decomposed by the passage of the public, which for the entire duration of the exhibition will become an active agent of the work, modifying its configuration.
Mohammed El Hajoui, “Finito-Atba-Infinito”, 2025, installation view, courtesy Studio la Linea Verticale, Bologna
Beyond the preciousness of its beauty, the rarefied mental landscape evoked by this installation expresses in its constituent elements a complex symbolic stratification. First of all, in Moroccan culture the carpet is the place where one sleeps, prays and welcomes guests: more than an object, it is a witness that passes through generations, incorporating their memories. Secondly, the circular movement around the central door cannot help but evoke the tawaf, the ritual circumambulation of the Kaaba, here secularized as an aesthetic and conceptual experience. The visitors, unwitting secular pilgrims, circling around the enigmatic sculptural fulcrum, create an involuntary collective choreography, where the individual and community dimensions overlap. Finally, the meditative attitude required by the work originates in its process of realization, accomplished through gestures that recall the ritual prostration of prayer: bending down, positioning the stencils with millimetric precision, shaking the sieve to spread the powder, standing up, moving a few centimeters, bending down again.
Mohammed El Hajoui, “Finito-Atba-Infinito”, 2025, installation view, courtesy Studio la Linea Verticale, Bologna
The finite in the obsessive circumscription of detail, the infinite in the unstoppable multiplication of the module, and between these two extremes between which the artist shuttles, atba, the liminal space where everything is possible and the boundary between self and other becomes permeable. Mohammed El Hajoui’s works open engaging questions about issues of belonging and self-representation, about the dialectic between control and surrender, about the continuity of forms through time. They are invitations to pause on the threshold, to look around before deciding whether to enter or remain outside, suggesting that perhaps it is precisely on that boundary line that existence is played out. During the last week of the exhibition, from November 26 to 28, 2025, the public will be invited to participate, by walking on the ephemeral carpet, in the activation of Mohammed El Hajoui’s work Radici, an intervention that will lead to its final transformation.
[1] The word “Atba” attempts to translate the expression “3atba” into an Italian sound. This expression, used in digital or informal Arabic speech, transliterates the word عــــــــتــــبـــــة, meaning “threshold.” The number 3 is used to represent the Arabic letter ع’) (Ayn), a guttural sound with no equivalent in Italian.
Info:
Mohammed El Hajoui. Finito-Atba-Infinito
24/10/2025 – 29/11/2025
Studio la Linea Verticale
Via dell’Oro, 4, Bologna
www.studiolalineaverticale.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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