Galerie Claude Lemand

BENANTEUR. The Song of Pain, 1959-1961.
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Claude Lemand :

A soli­tary painter, Abdallah Benanteur is the type of non-hero, unlike other Algerian artists of his gen­er­a­tion, who lived in Paris around the writer Kateb Yacine, such as M’hamed Issiakhem, Choukri Mesli, Mohammed Khadda. All these Algerians were for the inde­pen­dence of Algeria: they through armed struggle and he through non­vi­o­lent resis­tance. Benanteur was fun­da­men­tally a paci­fist, like the Sufis and above all like Mahatma Gandhi, the nation­alist and uni­ver­salist herald and fighter of non-vio­lence, whom he always admired. He was not for the armed struggle, which could only engender death and hatred, but for the tes­ti­mony by his works, elo­quent enough for who knows how to see them, feel them and under­stand them.

His godson, the writer Habib Tengour, remem­bers the weekly cous­cous that his par­ents gave to the "starving artists" who were then Benanteur and Khadda, during which he wit­nessed heated debates between these two friends from Mostaganem, the one frankly against and the other fiercely for the armed struggle, to wrest the inde­pen­dence of Algeria from France.

In 1958, Abdallah Benanteur learned of the death in combat of his younger brother Charef, who had deserted the French army with arms and bag­gage and had joined the maquis. He is shocked and sus­pends all artistic activity: nei­ther painting, nor drawing, nor any new water­color in the spirit of his mar­velous white pro­duc­tion of 1957. He decides to marry Monique Boucher, whom he had met in 1954 on the Pont des Arts, after a long period of atten­dance and hesi­ta­tion on the part of Abdallah, given his pre­car­ious finan­cial sit­u­a­tion and the idea he had of mar­riage. The announce­ment of the death in combat of his brother Charef had prob­ably decided him to start a family and have chil­dren. His eldest son Dahmane was born one year later, in April 1959.

When he resumes painting, his painting changes rad­i­cally in style, tech­nique, format and theme. During these two years of intense activity, he pro­duced a coherent, pow­erful and rel­a­tively abun­dant set of paint­ings (given the short time he had to paint), with titles exclu­sively linked to Algeria, which I des­ig­nated under the title of Desert Period. Her painting adopts an abstract, mate­rial and monochrome land­scape, without any pleasant or attrac­tive fig­u­ra­tive or col­ored ele­ment that could link her to an ori­en­talist cur­rent. He adopted an impres­sionist way of painting, made up of thou­sands of strokes accu­mu­lated with a fine brush. The drawing that sur­rounded its shapes and flat areas dis­ap­pears and the com­po­si­tion becomes linear, hor­i­zontal and repet­i­tive, some­times enlivened by a few ver­tical lines in the same monochrome ocher tones. It is his "desert period", the Algerian land as a symbol of pain, of resis­tance and of the Algerian iden­tity that col­o­niza­tion has con­stantly sought to tear away. The art his­to­rian Raoul-Jean Moulin will say of these land­scapes that they are like the por­trait of his brother and of mar­tyred Algeria and per­haps even like self-por­traits of the painter him­self.