Photographs by Fokion Zissiadis
Morocco is a portal to mystery and sensuality, which is why important artists, poets, and writers became obsessed with its beauty, and why their lives changed because of it. Cities such as Tangier, Casablanca, and Marrakech, though deeply religious, exude a tolerance for adventures of all sorts, even, as Paul Bowles once said, for spicy proclivity.
Throughout the twentieth century, Morocco has attracted international names enchanted by its unique cultural amalgamation: an Eastern country rooted in Africa. Painters such as Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon, and Brice Marden, poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Paul Bowles, as well as countless actors (Alain Delon, Marisa Berenson), and musicians (Edith Piaf, Cat Stevens, Jimi Hendrix) ... all of them shared with Fokion a thirst for adventure and wanderlust!
This album concludes a tetralogy: Iceland, Greenland, Vietnam, Morocco. If you line them up, your curiosity will be piqued and you’ll discover Fokion's chromatic vocabulary. This ordered sequence is a hymn to nature, light, and color. It remains focused on the essence of the landscape without a need for explanation. For twelve years now, he has been engaged with landscape as a "chromatic aberration", to use Goethe’s term. He juxtaposes icebergs with sand dunes, creating a personal Farbenlehre through his experiences and travels. As the German poet said, "the most important thing is to understand that everything in the realm of fact is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of chromatics. Let us not seek for something beyond the phenomena—they themselves are the theory."