djamel tatahdjamel tatah solo show 1:54 marrakech 2019 - booth 10 february 23/24 2019 with the...

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Djamel TATAH Solo Show 1:54 Marrakech 2019 - Booth 10 February 23/24 2019 With the suport of Centre National des Arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France PRESS KIT For more information, please contact Jérôme Poggi (+33)6 09 55 66 66 [email protected] Eléonore Levai (+33)6 42 01 88 18 [email protected] Djamel Tatah, Untitled, Oil and wax on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, 2016 Courtesy Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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Page 1: Djamel TATAHDjamel TATAH Solo Show 1:54 Marrakech 2019 - Booth 10 February 23/24 2019 With the suport of Centre National des Arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France

Djamel TATAHSolo Show

1:54 Marrakech 2019 - Booth 10 February 23/24 2019With the suport of Centre National des Arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France

PRESS KITFor more information, please contact

Jérôme Poggi(+33)6 09 55 66 66

[email protected]éonore Levai

(+33)6 42 01 88 [email protected]

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Page 2: Djamel TATAHDjamel TATAH Solo Show 1:54 Marrakech 2019 - Booth 10 February 23/24 2019 With the suport of Centre National des Arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France

1:54 Marrakech Booth 10

Djamel Tatah

1:54 Marrakech Booth 10

EVENTDjamel Tatah

1:54 Marrakech

Jérôme Poggi gallery is pleased to present a solo show of Djamel Tatah, who just joined the gallery last September 2018. Echoing its first participation to 1:54 London (with works by Kapwani Kiwanga, in 2014), the gallery is glad to deepen its relationship with the African art scene. In the continuum of its international development, firstly oriented towards North America and South America, the gallery is aiming to foster intellectual and professional exchanges with Africa and the Middle-East.

Djamel Tatah and MoroccoAlthought Djamel Tatah benefits from great international exposure, especially in the Maghreb region where the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Algiers dedicated an extensive exhibition to the artist in 2013, or through his presence at the MACAAL collections, it is paradoxically its first solo show in Morocco. All the more so since the country has been a great source of inspiration for Djamel Tatah. A few years ago, a trip to Casablanca profoundly affected the artist. The silhouettes of numerous "wanderers" (men, women, children) relentlessly striding across the streets of the port town had a strong impact on the artist's' iconography. Djamel Tatah payed tribute to these figures in several works presented at the fair.

A work at the crossroads between Europe and North Africa Born in Saint-Chamond from Berber parents, Djamel Tatah is neither French nor Algerian, while still being deeply both: a contemporary artist, fed by multiple cultures.

As Erik Verhagen wrote: "A body of work is always built out of a series of assimilations and rejections, elements that persist and elements that are suppressed, selected memories. This is certainly true of the work of Djamel Tatah, which of course owes a lot to his years of training in Saint-Etienne.

It should be pointed out from the outset that Tatah has always refused to adhere to a prevalling dogma, knowing intuitively, as Edward Said has put it, « how historical and cultural realities are strangely interwoven, how they are part of a multitude of often contradictory experiences and fields, spilling across national frontiers, defying simplistic controlling logic and patriotic vociferation.

Far from being monadic, monolithic, autonomous entities, cultures in fact incorporate more elements of change and difference han they consciously reject ». In that respect, it would not be inappropriate to see Tatah’s work as embodying French painting in the post-colonial sense of the term, a hybrid form of expression shorn of its protectionist reflexes, open to a multitude of cross-fertilisations and overlappings."

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Djamel Tatah

Born in 1959, the Franco-Algerian artist studied in France at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Etienne from 1981 to 1986. He has taught at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris since 2008. He lives and works near in Provence, France.

Tatah has presented his works throughout France and the world over, including Salamanca Arts Centre (Spain), Guangdong Museum of Art (China), MAMAC Nice and Château de Chambord (France), Villa Medici (Italy), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Algier (Algeria), Fondation Maeght and Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Etienne Métropole (France).

Djamel Tatah

Tatah’s work is included in prominent private and public collections such as Barjeel Art Foundation (UAE), The British Museum (UK), Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, MAACAL (Marrakech), and Fondation Maeght (France).

* * * * *

Recently, the Lambert Collection in Avignon dedicated an important solo show to Djamel Tatah, creating a dialogue between his works and those from Yvon Lambert's prestigious minimal art collection. The Matisse Museum in Nice will present a personnal exhibition of the artist in Summer 2020. It will be curated by Eric de Chassey, invited by Claudine Grammont.

To mark his entrance at the Jérôme Poggi gallery, Djamel Tatah will be at the center of a double exhbition in Paris in May 2019, held in the main space of the gallery facing the Centre Pompidou and at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris.

« My painting is silent, and imposing silence on all the chaos of life is almost like making a political statement. It allows one to step back and examine one’s relationship to others and to society as a whole»

- Djamel Tatah

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Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvas200 x 200 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvas60 x 80 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvasDiptych, 100 x 100 cm each Courtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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1:54 Marrakech Booth 10

Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2017Oil and wax on canvas120 x 100 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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Djamel Tatah

Sans titre, 2016Huile et cire sur toile100 x 100 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvasDyptich, 120 x 100 cm eachCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvas80 x 60 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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1:54 Marrakech Booth 10

Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvas100 x 120 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

Page 12: Djamel TATAHDjamel TATAH Solo Show 1:54 Marrakech 2019 - Booth 10 February 23/24 2019 With the suport of Centre National des Arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France

1:54 Marrakech Booth 10

Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvas100 x 100 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

Page 13: Djamel TATAHDjamel TATAH Solo Show 1:54 Marrakech 2019 - Booth 10 February 23/24 2019 With the suport of Centre National des Arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France

1:54 Marrakech Booth 10

Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvas200 x 200 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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1:54 Marrakech Booth 10

Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvas100 x 120 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvas220 x 200 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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1:54 Marrakech Booth 10

Djamel Tatah

Untitled, 2016Oil and wax on canvas100 x 120 cmCourtesy Galerie Poggi, Paris & Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

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Djamel Tatah

DJAMEL TATAH - TEXTS

Djamel Tatah’s figures seem to come from nowhere. Nothing connects them to a specific time or space, save a few vestimentary allusions to an era of hesitant contours.Tatah’s figures belong, first and foremost, to a world beyond time – where there is no chronolo- gy, no regression or progress – they belong to the art space. A space that stands out immedi- ately from our cal-culated spaces. It captivates us with its strange other-ness.And it is indeed a question of ‘we ‘: me and the other, me or the other and yet nothing is there to help us find our bearings using our common recognition capacity. What we like about Tatah’s paintings is not the fact that we recognise his subjects. To the contra-ry, it is precisely because we do not know whom we are dealing with: an everyday individual, a character seen in the actu- al world, a sleeper, a dead person, a dreamer, a group procession, phantoms of an indi-vidual or historical conscience, a dancer, an appa-rition, a changing being... We do not know what we are dealing with: a wall, a curtain, a sky, a window, a f loor, a motion picture film, a screen, the ‘ether’, the mind space, a disconnected space. The more rigour Tatah puts into his paintings, the more they provoke a sentiment, using their very subtlecombinations and interplays of metamorphoses between images, ideas and shapes, the more they invite us into a f loating space. The space of a concept that, not content with either the lit- eral or the sym-bolic, forces us to partake in a very concrete expe-rience: that of becoming a ‘fig- ure for the picture’, a ‘figure for the painting’, mobilised by an experimen-tal, hybrid search for meaning.Here we have a description, a word, formulated to be at the same time contradicted by that which is not of a lexical order, but that of line, texture or colour. The word is opened out to be- come enriched with

new meaningful hypotheses. Untitled [Sans titre] is the artist’s choice of title for most of his paintings. The field is open. We are caught up in a painting that prompts us to ask questions foreign to argumentative thinking and, perhaps, helps us to reach other states of analysis or vi-sion. What does this work offer us? Consciousness, the experience of solitude, that of the solitary woman and man who now, to a great extent, people our countryside and our towns.

How do we experience that individual’s solitude? Through the solitude of the human figure, on the peri-phery of a colourful void that allows not the slightest anchorage point for the figure de- picted therein.Through the great distances separating the bodies for-ming the vast polyptical compositions, as, for example, in one of the artist’s rare titled paintings, Self-portrait with a stele [Autoportait à la stèle] from 1990 [Musées de Montbéliard, 90002, p. 36/37]. There, Tatah depicts him-self twice,at either side of a vast expanse of orangey/red punctuated in the middle by a rectangular area comprising a blue gateway, itself surrounding a dark red rectangle, an abs-tract form reinforcing the hieratism of the two human figures. The rectangle not only represents a stele, but also a doorway, a threshold, in any case a verticality wit-hout any further attributes apart from being its very own expression, enigmatic, isolated and unique, heralding a transition into the world be- yond the painting.

The meaning of what is happening can also be reversed and no longer imply a journey beyond the canvas, beyond the foreground, but instead convey the message that the subject is at the very edge of a void, in this case in front of us, his or her gaze usually fixed on a lateral space or an area behind us, thus compelling us to turn around and perceive ourselves in the midst of the- se mobile, vacant spaces of whose inhabited presence we are aware.

Silence and solitude, Olivier Kaeppelin

Djamel Tatah exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Algiers,Marguerite & Aimé Maeght Foundation, 2013-2014

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Djamel Tatah

It is also striking to note the extent to which Tatah uti-lises the potential of the area beyond the pictorial frame through the slant of a head, a profile, attitudes struck by a figure contemplating worlds beyond the confines of the painting, as if there were no longer any direct interlocu-tors that might be represented on the canvas, merely a hypothetical presence, perhaps discernible through the onlooker’s status that we occupy.

That solitude might also be conveyed by a woman lowe-ring her head or that of bodies lying on the ground, like those of homeless people, or bodies in motion whom wakefulness or life has abandoned.

Many of the figures in Tatah’s paintings collapse into themselves, sucking the entire painted sur- face, a combi-nation of backdrops of extreme intensity, boundary lines formed by clothing, in- candescent capillary vessels, into a white face that resembles a piece of fabric that we turn over in our hands to reveal an invisible space, the space of the body’s interior, or that of a hidden, perhaps purpo-sely concealed, psyche. What better way to clarify or in-deed complicate our ob- servations than to cite the words of Hamlet quoted by Clément Rosset in his L’Invisible?

“Queen GertrudeAlas, how is’t with you,That you do bend your eye on vacancyAnd with the incorporal air do hold discourse?[...] To whom do you speak this? HamletDo you see nothing there? Queen GertrudeNothing at all; yet all that is I see. HamletNor did you nothing hear? Queen GertrudeNo, nothing but ourselves.’’

The astonishing force of Tatah’s œuvre is that, as in the works of Samuel Beckett, Alberto Gia- cometti or Jim Jarmusch, it puts us face-to-face with the obsessive pres-ence of nothingness, the vacuum, thanks to which, para-doxically, we are at last able to hear our own words.

It is through the act of subtraction that the world in Tatah’s paintings or drawings finds its full intensity and peoples itself with presences. It is through what we call si-lence or silences that the slightest sign, the slightest noise, the slightest sound – for do colours not make a sound? – trans- form the canvas into a vital space at once sin-gular and composed of many parts that become unified before our very eyes. Silences fashion Tatah’s subjects, the

extended bodies who lie re- versed in their sleep, vectors that carry us towards dream territories, or those of the imagination, like a space within a space, a picture within a picture. We know nothing of all that apart from the fact that we are witnessing the body’s volumes opening onto intangible bodies that we cannot see. Silence is a feature of the virtual world, which is one of the resources used in Tatah’s works. Each body carries a multitude of other possible bodies. They are at once their memory and their projection into the future. In this sense, they may never add up to an image, but they are focal points of images that give them this very particular, substantial, unfatho-mable quality. Phan- toms, perhaps.

That silence, though there is nothing to affirm it, can so-metimes turn into the silence of death, as in the particu-lar case of Untitled from 1992 [FRAC Île de France – Le Plateau, 92009, p. 48],which refers us to The Dead Bullfighter [Torero mort] by Édouard Manet. Thus everything could be immobilised, but, as in Maurice Blanchot’s Death Sentence [L’Arrêt de mort], another being is born from the remains, so-mething levitates above the ground, something is flying, something else is metamorphosing into a landscape, nature, something else still is a river of folds, making an item of clothing an attribute more alive than the body itself. That something which moves, that movement, in essence, has a name; in Death Sentence it is writing, here it is painting and it is silence that gives rise to that birth.

Tatah proposes a different aspect of otherness, one of exchange, communication in our society, a society that, through its representations, challenges the common function of the spoken word and language. It all takes place amid the intense relationship between the figures and the on- looker, before or after language.Before: as if nothing could yet be formulated since the subject is caught in a moment of suspen- sion, in para-lysis, in the midst of an experience, and has not yet the words to give it meaning.After: as if all the sentences, grammatical rules, questions had been exhausted by the use of words, and there then comes a moment when the world must still be tirelessly questioned, but via other means, via the concept that is sight, via that which, therefore, comes to life, joins in the silence, in other words via art and painting.Silence and Solitude, two weapons that withstand the test of time and, I think, two key statuses for the subject of our times, not the passive, errant subject, but the subject who uses his or her creation or life to build a represen-

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Djamel Tatah

tation of a person, one, who in Tatah’s work, is a dee-ply con- temporary person, not because of his or her common nature, but thanks to painting. It is paint- ing that, mutely, recurrently and stubbornly, turns silence and solitude into two weapons that allow us to think of Today as the immemorial Time, without boundaries, of a humanity that with- stands all levelling and destruction.Perhaps, as we contemplate the works of Djamel Tatah, we should be reminded of the words of Spinoza: ‘All that is known by the soul to possess a kind of eternity, the soul knows it not be- cause it perceives the present existence of the body, but because it perceives the essence of the body to have a kind of eternity’.

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Djamel Tatah

In France one of the consequences of globalization and a changing political situation has been the pursuit of a more equitable situation for artists who, while of French nationality, represent a range of origins expli-cable in terms only of recent history, and certainly not of the presence of many generations of ancestors on French soil.(While this presences is generally a fic-tion, the perception of a stable identity isnonetheless conditioned by belief in that fiction). Thus there has ari-sen the category of artists of North African or Arab ori-gin, which has been validated by exhibitions such as “Africa Remix” (2005), for which the prerequisite for participation was birth on the African continent, including the Maghreb; and “Traversées”, coinciding with the Art Paris fair in 2007 and bringing together some twenty artists “from the Arab world”, a number of them nonetheless holding European passports.

In this context Djamel Tatah’s place is not an easy one. Having appeared on the public art scene in the early 1990s, before the new category became appli-cable, he has been very reluctant to be termed a French artist of Algerian origin. Moreover, having been born near St Chamond in France, he lacks the geogra-phical qualification for exhibitions using thecriterion of African birth. At the same time his birth before Algerian independence made him de facto and for many years a foreigner in France, as the 1962 agreement between France and the new country provided that people born before independence to Arabic or Berber parents were to be considered Algerian.

This situation enables Tatah’s work to embody, in what may be an exemplary manner, stances that are practically post-imperial, in the sense intended by Edward Said when he wrote, “We begin to sense that old authority cannot simply be replaced by new authori-ty, but that new alignments made acrossborders, types, nations and essences are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new alignmentsthat now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism.ii“Whereas “there is, in all nationally defined cultures [here one could add ‘communitarian’or ‘imperially universal’], I believe, an aspiration to sove-

Fragments about identity, Eric de Chassey

Exhibition catalogue “I Mutanti”, Villa Médicis, Rome, Italy, 2010

-reignty, to sway, and to dominance”iii,and to the nega-tion ofothers; and whereas “even in the contentiousness of struggle, imperialism and its opponents fought over the same terrain, contested the same history [and] certainly overlapped where French-educated Algerians or Viet-namese...confronted their imperial masters”iv, an artist like Djamel Tatah has shown that he was already, in a way, a step ahead of the nationalisms of the globalized market.

Socially speaking there exists a precise expectation re-garding what “expressing one’s identity” entails. That phrase itself is merely a prefabricated construct, a commonplace that is no more than the expression of identitarian – and to be frank, racist – prejudice on the part of the user; this in the sense that someone who takes for granted ethnic character and an ontology of ethnicity and origin is racist. We find in Tatah’s work a few paintings that nevertheless fit with this demand for identifiable identitarian content, notably in such youthful works as the annual (1986-90) picture featuring the capital of a column of the Mansura at Tlemcen, the last of which is Self-portrait at the Mansura. The same is true, if less obviously, in the paintings showing a kid hol-ding a rock (just like a young fighter of the 1er Intifada) or those using the figure of the Hittiste (“he who holds up the wall”), an exemple being the series of 21 pictures from 2003-05 that was presented in 2008 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. This figure initially made its appea-rance in a strictly Algerian context, but for many years now has been a feature of the banlieues, France’s wor-king class and/or immigrant suburbs, and as such has lost its specifically communitarian character, becoming instead generational and social.

The point here is not to say that this iconographic reading is without importance. The use of a decipherable iconography is justified precisely to the extent that it leads the viewer to decipher it, but, because Tatah is a painter, the visible in his work does not hinge on the legible. The image-system of painting and of visual works of art in general is such that iconography is inseparable from form. In any case, this iconography does not invoke a world of stable essences : it is not a matter of identifying, or identifying oneself, once and for all, but of letting oneself be reached and challenged by issues

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Tatah’s painting confronts what is called “tradition”. Tra-dition, however, is not something external, but something appropriatedand transformable. This is true not only from a material, ma-teriological point of view, but also in terms of ambition. In other words, which tradition isto be confronted, and of which tradition (in terms of approach and strategy) is to be made use ? There is of course a clear relation-ship, that of “influencing oneself ” if I may transform the passive “being influenced” into an action with the postwar modernist tradition and, distinctively, with American Abstract Expressionist painting and that which came after. To be brief, and returning to the comparisons that were quick to appear in critical commentary on the artist, there is a very strong rela-tionship between Djamel Tatah and Barnett Newman, and with American abstract painting’s use of large areas of flat colour, as in the work of an Ellsworth Kelly. A rapid, simplistic reading could thus suggest that Tatah = Newman + Arabness (in the form of figures dressed in black and the presence of sometimes readily reco-gnisable models). As if on the one hand there was the great Western tradition, simultaneously source and objective, and on the other the big or small added extra of a postcolonial ethnic identity.

The first thing to note is that there may be a strategic intelligence at work here, inasmuch as identifying the target reference as postwar American art relates to the resistance operation outlined by Said, “it must to a certain degree work to recover forms already established or at least influenced or infiltrated by the culture of empire”v. Most importantly of all, it must be emphasised that this tradition is in no way an external one : when a student at the Saint-Etienne school of art the artist cut his teeth on the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in that city, and the images that have fuelled him since then have not been confronted with an iconic culture that might have predated them. In this respect the situation is similar to that of France and its colo-nies as described by Etienne Balibar, “Nothing could be more misleading than to portray colonisationas an “external”enterprise, an addition to a history of France whose meaning – not to say destiny – supposedly lies in the nation itself... Contemporary France was shaped in and by colonisation. And today it is moving into crisis on this very same basis.»

At the same time, certain features attributable to Modernism, flat grounds, for example, might equally be seen as reflecting an Islamic artistic tradition. The

artist himself pointed this out in the catalogue for “Femmes d’Alger” using a quotation from Dominique Clevenot, “in the profane field of representational painting, the plane figure is a necessary mode oforganization, pros-cribing all ocularperspective and all visuall illusion of a bodily presence.vii»In a way, what is happening here is a return to sender, in that we know how much that great, f lat modernist, Matisse, owed to the Islamic East, revealed to him during his trip to Algeria in 1906, the exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1908 and his trips to Marocco in 1912-13.

Some of the features identifiable as “Arab” in Tatah’s work also stem from a reduplication of the exoticising gaze, such is the case with the theme of “Women a Al-giers”, which underwent three incarnations over a long period (1994, 1996 and 2003) and whose title signals therelationship with the Delacroix painting dating from the first years of the French conquest of Alge-ria. We must by wary here of those interpretations that attach the meaning of the pictures to a highly specific Algerian situation, making them a virtually direct treatment of contemporary events : the host of assassinations, massacres and crackdowns perpetrated-since the early 1990s. More aptly, it could be said that the way Tatah works is similar to that of his friend and model of several paintings, singer Rachid Taha, who in 2004 took the Arabic-tinged Clash tune Rock the Cas-bah and Arabised it even further but only after the song, the work of an intensely politically committed group who had come out with I’m So Bored with the USA in 1977, had been used as an anthem by the United States army radio during the first Gulf War.

In Tatah’s work, the question is neither that of “repre-sentation” in the sens of direct figurative representa-tion of what had not previously been represented, nor of some possible need to feel oneself represented. In this respect representation must be distinguished from the figurative depictions of unwritten episodes from African-American history Jacob Lawrence embarked on in the 1940s, especiallythe Migration Series of 1940-41; as well as from the feeling, that black figures are not represented in museums, that currently drives Kerry James Marshalll (b.1955) to introduce this mis-sing representation into large painted compositions.

What must be taken into account here is where iden-tity lies at in the legal sens. These individuals share their condition with many contemporaries. Born in

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Djamel Tatah

France in 1959, but of Algerian parents, Tatah was for a long time legally not French but Algerian, born before Independence and even though his father had fought in the Franch army during World War II. He grew up not in Algeria, but in L’Horme, near Saint-Etienne, and received French nationality only in 1991, after an initial refusal. Alge-ria is mainly for him a place to go for holidays, even if he has not visited since 1986. (He hardly ever goes to L’Horme, either, but nobody finds that especiallysurprinsing.) For him the culture that formed him and in which he continues to live is postnational, postimperial and hybrid. It would be far from easy to identify what might be considered pertinent to its centre or to its periphery.

Tatah’s work consistently ref lects a rationale of hybridization in the sense of a process of reciprocal, non-hierarchised transfers. His painting systemati-cally takes some pre-existing element as tis starting point, the iconographic material being photo-graphed and the composition given shape on a computer. I described the outcome in an essay in 2002, “The truth of the subjects, therefore, is due only remotely to a mimetic logic; it is properly pictorial»ix. Tatah’s use of repetition and varia-tion are central to the paintings shown at Villa Medici, especially in the series of 21 pictures from 2003-05 and further emphasizes this concept.

A univocal interpretation is thus out of the ques-tion : Tatah’s work cannot be put down to a visible identity. This does not prevent world events from affecting him and inf luencing his pictures, but they do so in the context of a detachment which, rather than directly involving the topical, makes play with it : examples are the impact of the two Gulf Wars, thebanlieues crisis in France in 2005 and the pauperization of a section of the world popu-lation that makes seeing a homeless person on a porch or a staicase a common exprerience.

The artist’s position, then, is one of self-detach-ment and exile, an exile from a world replaced by the coloured ground, by a quasi-metaphy-sicall but non-teleological experience similar to that of the desert, “Yes. Being on hold is what I want to paint.»

The result is a multiple distancing of the artist from his oeuvre, the spectator from the work and the self from the self – which is also a form of disidentification, although without the need to deny the existence of stratified identification processes. Through this combination of distan-cing and receptivity a discourse is constructed which makes use of all the virtues oh hibridi-zation and communicates them to viewers– of whom I am one, with my own particularities and personal history. We may wonder about the lack of any assertive violence, even though a degree of violence will certainly be felt in the experience visitors were summoned to in the Salle Blanche at the museum in Nantes, surrounded as they were by the same frontally presented figure. While Andy Warhol’s Shadows series of 1978-79 is one of the paradigmshere, the introduction of a reco-gnisable figure certainly intensifies the saturation effect.

We may also wonder about the form of universality thispresupposes,yet again this series insists on the fact that universalism is itself a construct, not a once-and-for-all category founded on some closed, fossilizated identity. Rather it has to do with the conclusion reached by Franz Fanon at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artits in Paris in September 1956, “Universality resides in this decision to recognize and accept the reciprocal relativism of different cultures, once the coloniall status is irreversibly excluded.

Page 23: Djamel TATAHDjamel TATAH Solo Show 1:54 Marrakech 2019 - Booth 10 February 23/24 2019 With the suport of Centre National des Arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France

1:54 Marrakech Booth 10

Djamel Tatah

FAIRS

ARTISTES

| Babi Badalov (AZ, 1959)| Fayçal Baghriche (DZ/FR, 1972)| Anna-Eva Bergman (NO/FR, 1909–1987)| Maxime Bondu (FR, 1985)| Julien Crépieux (FR, 1979)| Bady Dalloul (FR, 1986)| Larissa Fassler (CA, 1975)| Sidival Fila (BR, 1962) | Yona Friedman (HU, 1923)| Nikita Kadan (UA, 1982)

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EXIBITIONS

| Kapwani Kiwanga (CA/FR, 1978)| Bertrand Lamarche (FR, 1966)| Paul Mignard (FR, 1989)| Wesley Meuris (BE, 1977)| Sophie Ristelhueber (FR, 1949)| Société Réaliste (FR/HU, 1982/1972)| Djamel Tatah (FR, 1959)| Georges Tony Stoll (FR, 1955)| Marion Verboom (FR, 1983)| Kees Visser (NL, 1948)

Art Paris Art Fair (FR)From Apr. 4th to Apr. 7th, 2019Anna-Eva Bergman & Sophie Ristelhueber

The Armory Show (US)From Mar. 6th to Mar. 10th, 2019Kapwani Kiwanga

FIAC (FR)From Oct. 17th to Oct. 22nd, 2019Kapwani Kiwanga

Beyrouth Art Fair (LB)From Sep. 18th to Sep. 22th, 2019To be confirmed

Anna-Eva Bergman - solo showFrom Jan. 19th to Mar. 9th, 2019Galerie Jérome Poggi, Paris

Sophie Ristelhueber - solo showFrom Mar. 23rd to May 4th, 2019Galerie Jérome Poggi, Paris

Djamel Tatah - solo showFrom May 16th to Jun. 15th, 2019Galerie Jérome Poggi, Paris

Sidival Fila - solo showFrom May 16th to Jun. 15th, 2019Galerie Jérome Poggi, Paris

Galerie Jérôme Poggi