Galerie Claude Lemand

18 September 2015

ABDALLAH BENANTEUR . Art Dubai Modern 2015 - Booth M7 .

ABDALLAH BENANTEUR. Masterpieces from 1982 to 1992.

Claude Lemand.

Born in 1931 in Mostaghanem, Abdallah Benanteur was brought up in an Algerian family and cultural environment, specifically enthralled by writing and illuminated manuscripts, by mystic Muslim poetry, by Andalusian music and songs. He settled in Paris in 1953.

Lacking his native Mediterranean light, Benanteur did not seek out, unlike so many other painters, a similar, physical quality of light, in the South, in Spain or Greece ; rather, he sought out a different light, a complementary one, that of painting, of his painting. The natural ideal of his previous life environment, a ceaseless object of nostalgia, was replaced by an environment suited to his creations : he spent his summer holidays in Brittany and not in the warm and sunny climes of the South. When he paints, engraves or creates books, he isolates himself within a filtered light, whether in his painting studio or in his graphic arts workshop. When he spent four successive months of August in Italy, his eyes perceived the country’s light but his vision was entranced by the light in ancient Italian paintings, which enhanced his palette from 1981 onwards.

Raoul-Jean Moulin.

Among the contemporary painters of the Maghreb, Abdallah Benanteur occupies a singular and exemplary place from an international point of view, through his legitimate and radical refusal of any form of academism, be it figurative, abstract, or post-modern, as well as any folkloric arrangements which would betray the authentic Arabic-Islamic tradition, which invariably ends up, notwithstanding its manner or know-how, within a reductive and normalising impoverishment of genuine popular creativity. On the other hand, he called upon painting, to endow it with a gesture taken from calligraphic principles, and which he always maintained concise, dense, imperiously rhythmic, never tempted to let itself be enclosed or subjected to the sign. It launched forth into the movements of a metaphorical and non-symbolical writing, delving deep into the painter’s background to freight itself with meaning and manifest itself in the men’s world, its only aim being to awaken in each of us the celebration of the imaginary. Because it was in his terrible loneliness, his obstinate silence, his abrupt mysticism and his instinct for transcendence, that he was able to find his genius, his passion for the upsurge and his innate taste for the stroke and the incision, his friend Rachid Boujedra wrote about him in 1987.

Marc Hérissé.
The underlying nostalgia of lost horizons, like in those “Pays - Paysages”, painted by the great Algerian artist, is but one of the facets of his inner world. His splendid oeuvre, universal in its reach, is not only limited to the recurrent viewing of the surroundings of Mostaganem. That is the departure point for a journeying which the artist invites us to share with him. Our eye is forever flickering, marvelling, unable to distinguish the abstract from the figurative, every canvas providing, from one moment to another, a new approach: and so they are revealed to us, multiple, polymorphs, harbingers of mystery, which, like every major work of art be it dramatic, symphonic, poetic or literary, is so rich that one can decode it and interpret it in various ways. Here the tondos, shown among the large square canvases, are not an aesthete’s entertainment, but a focal point, a symbol for the eye and its iris. The palette is iridescent, diaphanous, airy, transparently vibrant, maintained through a very sure touch, masterly, poetic and virile. Flashes of light, be they sunny or stormy, take you beyond the painting’s confines. One is reminded of Turner when faced with these shimmering lights. It is quite another world, but it holds the same magical quality.

Benanteur’s paintings have formal and sensitive beauties, with a strong visual impact, being neither figurative, insofar as the image could replace a photographic object, nor abstract, because there are always rooted within the elements of a deeply observed and felt nature. The recent works are lyrical landscapes, in which the imaginary struggles with deeply buried memories. A floating world, close to that of Chinese painting, in which top and bottom are interchangeable within a limitless space. But Benanteur never leaves any empty spaces, and his surface is worked over with coloured inflections, recalling air’s transparencies, or water’s motions, or else that of scudding clouds, leading to liquid and atmospheric fusion. All of these pictorial sensitivities are obtained from a fine scrumbling, worked over like watercolour with a very sure hand. His colours, sometimes diaphanous, sometimes opaque, provide all the changing beauties of the sun’s spectrum. The light emanating from them is finally the incarnation of the earth’s song.

Available Publications:

BENANTEUR, Paintings. Volume 1 of his monograph, prepared and published by Claude Lemand. Hard cover, 224 pages in colour, 25 x 33 cm. Texts in English and French. ISBN 2-910263-00-2

BENANTEUR, Graphic Works. Volume 2 of his monograph, prepared and published by Claude Lemand. Hard cover 288 pages in colour, 25 x 33 cm. Texts in English and French. ISBN 2-910263-02-9.