Contemporary Algerian painting

Precursors

Nearly one century after the colonial conquest, around the Years 1920, Azouaou Mammeri (1886 - 1954), Abdelhalim Hemche (1906 - 1978), Mohammed Zmirli (1909 - 1984), Ahmed Bensliman (1916 - 1951) and Miloud Boukerche (1920 - 1979), are the first, tie profit of a parsimoniously conceded teaching, to introduce into the Algerian culture the practice of the painting of rest. Generally, subjected to the pressure of ideological models which perpetuate the French academism, they cannot, in spite of recentrement of the vision on the reality of the Algerian life, which to fall under the margins of the current Orientaliste.

At the same time, other artists work to make revive the tradition of the Enluminure and introduce in Algérie the Eastern kind of the Miniature. Although pleading at Mohamed Racim (1896 - 1974) or Mohammed Temmam (1915 - 1988) in favor of colonized, their nostalgic celebration of the records of the past, palate, patios and princesses, basins and gazelles, allow yet only one “oblique expression” of the Algerian identity.

It is in these two only forms, except the Roman bracket, that the figuration develops in Algérie, on the ground of several millenia of popular expressions abstract symbolic systems, Berbères and Arab, integrated in the daily life through architecture and furniture, weavings and the potteries, the work of leathers and metals, where the representative image is rarer, if not almost goes away.

Founders

It is necessary to await what one could name the “generation of 1930”, majority of ten the young artists who compose it having been born around this year, so that is disputed in-depth the vision figurative and narrative, felt like foreign to the Maghrebian sensitivity. They are, in the Fifties, the true founders of modern Algerian art. Some, Issiakhem and Mesli, attended the Schools of the Art schools of Algiers and Paris, or, for Guermaz and Benanteur, that of Oran. Others, self-educated, began solitairement in their art, Baya but also Khadda, typographer, Aksouh, blacksmith, Zerarti, mason. In a route comparable with that of the first Algerian great writers of French language, Mohammed Dib or Kateb Yacine, some of these painters, attracted by the artistic effervescence which appears there since the beginning of the century, pass more or less lengthily by Paris and present to it exposures, such Issiakhem, Khadda and Mesli, while others will settle there definitively, Benanteur, Guermaz or Aksouh.

The shortly after Independence the demonstrations organized in Algiers then in Paris join together them. During a few years gallery 54 animated by Jean Sénac, poet of the Algerian hope, and the successive galleries of the editor Edmond Charlot, who it first published Albert Camus, expose them, at the sides of Sauveur Galliéro, Bénisti, more figurative, Jean de Maisonseul, but also Louis Nallard and Maria Manton, Marcel Bouqueton, which will take part in Paris, with the engraver Marcel Fiorini, with the development of the nonfigurative Peinture. Their works are quickly introduced with the Museum of the Art schools of Algiers which directs Jean de Maisonseul of 1962 to 1970.

Na5ive art, rough art, expressionnism

Three main tendencies continue from the start. The first, qualified the “naive one”, appears with Hacène Benaboura (1898 - 1960) and is primarily incarnated by Baya of which l'" rough Art " will become one of the symbols of Algerian creation.

Doubly orphan at five years, collected to twelve, the route of Baya Mahieddine (1931 - 1998) seems, with the image of its work, to raise of an improbable fairyhood when it to him is given the possibility of carrying out the gouaches, prefaced by André Breton, that Aimé Maeght exposes in 1947 whereas it is not even sixteen years old. Beyond kindnesses of the legend, its course is then stopped during ten years after a traditional marriage. In 1963 Baya can take again papers and gouaches. In false symmetries of its compositions, the bright color and contrasted balances in flat tints while a purified feature determines without hesitation nor repentance the profiles of its “High Ladies”, figures of the forever enigmatic Mother. Their transparent faces would be erased in the whiteness of paper if they were not the glare of their glances and the mass of their jet chevelures. The bouquets, the jugs and the fruits, later the musical instruments and all the parallel fauna of fish, birds and butterflies, which accompany them, untied of any volume, are detached under a light slack in a space which refuses any prospect illusionist.

More figurative in the coloured visions of Mohammed Bouzid (1929) or, more dramatic, of Ismail Samsom (1934 - 1988), a second tendency, expressionnist, are dominated by the personality of Me hamed Issiakhem.

Me hamed Issiakhem (1928 - 1985), “Eye of Lynx” as his/her friend Kateb Yacine calls it, is fifteen years old when it handles a grenade, collected in an American military camp: in the explosion two of his sisters and a nephew dies, it will be itself amputee of a front armlever. The Algerian suffering during the years of war as that which the Third world in the claim of its freedom endures will not cease reactivating the distressed climate of its painting which exorcizes all at the same time the pains of a personal drama and violences of the collective history. In a rageuse solidarity with the women and the men under all the latitudes walled in the silence of misery or oppression, the gesture of Issiakhem makes emerge from thick pastes all the faces of misfortune. The celebrations of the maternal universe, of a serenity whose painter was deprived, will constitute as many conspiracies of the tragedy of the human condition.

Not figuration

A last tendency, with Khadda and Benanteur which, friendly of childhood leave Mostaganem unit for Paris in 1953, Guermaz and Aksouh which are established ten years there later, or, more abstract, Mohamed Louail (1930), take the route of the abstraction.

“If figurative painting appears the normal expression, it is the result of the phenomenon of deculturation”, writing Mohammed Khadda (1930 - 1991) whose work, in the Années 1950, is at the origin of what Jean Sénac will name the “school of the Sign”. Of return in Algeria in 1963 Khadda, in writings without concession for the ideology then dominant, there defends the abstraction violently blamed and denounces “the opportunist realism” which tries to be essential during the “years of lead”. In a step where plastic creation and cultural reappropriation meet, its paintings, its watercolours and its engravings, being based on the plastic expressivity of the Arab writing, lead it to the meeting of graphics of the landscapes and the things, trees or stones, of the natural world. “Discovered writing of the world and exploration of the world of the writing will remain in its work indissociablement dependant in two complementary steps, each one resounding with measurement on the other, which will not cease bringing closer per degrees the painter, in his single search, of the same sources of the Sign” notes Michel-Georges Bernard. “I never employed the letter for the letter”, specifies Khadda, defying myself of all “new exoticism”. It approaches it in its “free Alphabets” neither in its present nor in its past but, in on this side any history, in a kind of former future, being done, as one wrote, " the archeologist of the possible".

In this abstract way Abdelkader Guermaz (1919 - 1996) is the elder one of its generation. As of the Années 1940 the gallery “Hill” of Oran exposes its freely figurative fabrics to the sides of those of Galliéro Saver or Orlando Pelayo. Starting from 1961 and of its installation in Paris its paintings, detached of any figuration, are woven highly coloured ascending tangles. Then on its fabrics a high wind of light passes which pastings of the matter trap. Around 1975 a new paysagism emerges from the succession of the coloured plans which they superimpose, high cliffs or solar stagings of peaks or dunes. The visible one is given at Guermaz in the mystery of the space with which it merges. With this degree of tension, its work, authenticates “painting of meditation”, is addressed to the spirit as much as with the eye.

Suspended in the Years 1950 in a frail network of veins, the fabrics of Abdallah Benanteur (1931) make then appear obscure grounds that the light does not cross any more but in vague marblings. It is as since the other side of the shade that it goes back to the beginning of the Années 1970, unreal, when the silhouettes of its “Visitors” meet towards dubious meetings. Its painting leads in the following decade to the throats and processions, collars and clearings of the “on-Mediterranean” whose memory revives the colors. Tiny anonymous crowd invades of them one moment spaces, which will be erased like mirages. Abdallah Benanteur simultaneously carried out starting from 1961 more than one thousand of works of bibliophilism, drawn with a limited number of specimens or single books enriched by watercolours and drawings, for which it chooses the texts, Algerian and European writers, Arab or Persan poets, composes the typography, carries out itself the impression and the pulling of its engravings.

Among the world of the forms and colors, finally, the route of Mohamed Aksouh (1934) starts at the edge of the gleams which cross the depths of emerald of the of Algiers shores. Then its painting, with the length of the Years 1970, opens the field of the glance on a labyrinth of lanes and frontages where the light is reflected in deafened echoes, seems to impregnate colors of the walls bleached with the lime which it passes very close to. The painting of Aksouh develops thereafter in a universe of outcrops, erased mosaics with half, stones appearing in the middle of old walls, stones or rollers crimped in the dust of the ways or the marblings of vagueness. Aksouh made there approach the silky cloud which irrigates the visible one, solar mist that the glance, without seeing it, in each moment crosses. In the pulverization of the keys “all the being of the world is then (...) only one inconstant state, a furtive precipitate, one changing moment of the light”.

" Aouchem"

On the territory inaugurated by the painters of the “generation of 1930” Algerian art multiplies its routes quickly. Choukri Mesli and Denis Martinez took part them also in the first exposures organized in Algiers and Paris after Independence. Both professors at the School of the Art schools of Algiers, they are the organizers of 1967 with 1971 of the group “Aouchem” (Tattooing) which gathers ten artists, poets and painters, in particular Hamid Abdoun (1929), Rezki Zérarti (1938) and Mustapha Akmoun (1946). They are also opposed them to the jugeesdemagogic imageries, which the official gallery of the National union of the Visual arts presents, founded in 1963 but whose majority of the active painters are excluded as of the beginning from the Années 1970. “Aouchem was born millenia ago, on the walls of a cave of the Tassili. It continued its existence until our days, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, according to the fluctuations of the History. (…) We intend to show that, always magic, the sign is stronger than the bombs”, declares their “Proclamation”. In spite of violences, certain plastic traditions succeeded in being maintained in the gestures which model and paint clay, weave wool, decorate the walls, engrave wood or metal: it is on these survivals that “Aouchem” wants to rest.

In intense colors partitioned in a luxuriant geometry near to the reasons Targui of the Saharan characters, paintings of Choukri Mesli (1931) make foresee, as emerged of eternal Tassili or Hoggar, of the Cortèges of Guerriers and Ancêtres which answer later of the female silhouettes the sculptural forms which evoke Tin Hinan.

Denis Martinez (1941) is more largely inspired still popular arts, reasons for the potteries and weavings, signs Tifinagh and bits of penmanships, memories of the Andalusian culture. At the end of the Années 1980 its fabrics fall under the rates/rhythms of the space of the Berber houses, while the " actions" that it leads with its pupils, during about fifteen years until its exile in 1994, exert a durable influence on several generations of artists. In its strongly structured fabrics multiply the graphic arrows which suggest, in the middle of a swarming of points and lines, stars and bees, snakes and lizards, the movements and the relations of omnipresent the " Personnage" , anxious and interrogative, which, with the length of the decades, signs its painting. In the Years 1990, its re-creation of the layouts divinatoires of the great South then processions, with Marseilles even, d'" Aghendjas" of Kabylie, to beseech in a traditional way either the rain but more politically peace in Algeria vis-a-vis the Integrism, constitutes a result, halfway performance and Installation, with the assistance of poets and musicians, of magic size from the start present in its Article.

Matters and signs

The recourse to the C-W communication of the Letter and the Sign supports largely thereafter, of decade in decade, the developments of Algerian painting. Majhoub Ben Bella (1946) and Rachid Koraïchi (1947) thus more narrowly refers to penmanship than they divert, in their palimpsests or talismans, in vertiginous pulverizations. Ali Silem (1947), tying the Letter “like wool fringes” in the middle of the gilded or calcined matters its Deserted , seems to deploy internal space of it. Malek Salah (1949) and Saci Mohand (1949) fits differently in an interrogation of the space which disregards this identity dimension while Hamida Chellali (1948), Samta Benyahia (1949) and Akila Mouhoubi (1953) combines vigorously, in the swirls of the color or accumulation symbolic system, painting with the female one.

The work of Hamid Tibouchi (1951), recognized initially like one of the major representatives of the young Algerian poetry of French expression, is characteristic of this search of the sign, which it renews and pushes until in the intimacy of the matters. The natural dyes, pigments, inks and dyeings, sand or coal, which it uses on the humblest supports, papers, paperboards or various fabrics, crystallize the dissimulated messages of them. On the surface of their textures show through like the Pages of old parchments, of Archéographies without age or of internal Partitions where slips and tangles up a wild expansion of “graphèmes”.

Renewing the spirit of “Aouchem”, Zoubir Hellal (1952), one of the organizers, with Karim Sergoua (1960), of the recent group “Essebaghine” (Painters), Mokhtar Djaafer (1953) whose works are registered with the crossroads of engraving and painting, Arezki Larbi (1955) in its “pyrogrammes” of the Années 1980 or its intensely coloured later fabrics, Mohand Ould Mohand], 1960) releasing by gusts or slow waves the innumerable species of the Sign, would be still representative of this tendency. Abdelwahab Mokrani (1956), in its faces and its bodies drowned in the matter, and Djilali Kadid (1946) continues routes plus expressionnists on the other hand.

Among a whole whole of younger painters, who regularly integrate in their works the evocation of the Berber C-W communication, coloured fairyhoods of Slimane are essential particularly (Slimane Ould Mohand, 1966) which mixes female faces, silhouettes of teapots and jugs, of cats, asses or birds, reduced to their filigrees. Walking on differently towards its origins, Philippe Amrouche (1966) made reappear to become to them, under lights of sands or red clays, the points and triangles of the unmemorable checkerwork deposited on the potteries kabyles. Mixing the tar, the powders, inks and varnishes, incorporating the most various materials, practitioner joinings, having today recourse to the installations and the performances, good number of these artists work not only on the fabric, which they prefer frequently free of any frame, but as on the more strange wood, paperboard and other supports, extending their creation to other forms as the painting of rest. Thus Windows or curtains saturated with Raouf Brahmia (1965) on which has a presentiment of the vestiges of the things and the images, or the washboards, bags, elements of domestic apparatuses, plates and sections of beams which Kamel Yahiaoui transfigures (1966).

At the edge of this extension of painting out of its traditional space, the sculpture is in particular represented by Mohamed Demagh (1930), Mohand Amara (1952) and Rachid Khimoune (1953), one of the major artists of a new generation born in France. Grinding the paving stones, flagstones and grids of the roadways and pavements, it detaches some with the length of the cities of the prints which, recomposed, become men, women, Enfants of the world , Guerriers breaking remote times, Tortues or Poisson , while the fauna of the fossils wakes up which sommeillaient in the recovered skeletons of the abandoned machines.

Outlines

The Algerian artists have thus in a half-century strongly integrated their voices into the dialogs of the contemporary expressions. Very often the elder ones passed more or less lengthily by Paris, some settled there. Having initially exposed in Algeria when, at the beginning of the Years 1980, on the end of the “years of lead”, open new cultural places and the first independent galleries, in particular activates it Galerie Issiakhem-Isma of Algiers animated by Mustapha Orif, several of the painters of the following generations join them, presented to the Algerian Arts center, in many associative places and some galleries in Paris, in suburbs and province. Under the impulse of Lucette Albaret, the ADEIAO undertakes to better make known the “multiple Expressions” of Algeria, joining together in 1987 Baya, Issiakhem and Khadda, still organizing a “Homage to Baya” at the time of its disappearance, Tibouchi exhibitor, Koraïchi, or more recently, Khadda, Guermaz and Aksouh.

In 1993 the poet and novelist Tahar Djaout, symbol of intellectual resistance to the integrism, which had accompanied by its articles and forewords the courses, in particular, of Baya, Khadda, Mesli, Martinez, Tibouchi, Djaafer, Mohand or Khimoune, was assassinated. The poets Laadi Flici and Youcef Sebti, the playwright Abdelkader Alloula, the principal of the Art schools of Algiers, Ahmed Asselah, had, among so much of other victims, to share its fate. Many painters were then, under the threat, constrained to take refuge in France. Others, through the “years of blood”, remained in the risk, trying to maintain, to revive today, a devastated cultural life. On both sides of the Mediterranean they have all opposite with the fatal nightmare of fanaticism the true face of creative Algeria.

Contemporary figuration

With the beginning of the year 1990, figurative painting takes a dominating place on the international artistic scene. Several Algerian painters make their mode of expression of it. Hocine Ziani (1953), one of most representative of this mobility, is illustrated by a production of fabrics of narration, in a style being combined with the Hyperréalisme. Other artists belong to the family of figurative, in particular Moussa Bourdine and Rachid Djemai.

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