Djamel Tatah

• 02/06/2010 – 19/09/2010
• Opening Tuesday 01/06/2010

Djamel Tatah prince of melancholy

Painting’s Trial

By Frédéric Bouglé, January 2010

Wax painting, as employed by the artist, is such an ancient technique that even Pline would not detail its origins. Present in Fayoum portraits in Egypt from the 1st through to the 5th centuries, it was also applied in naval construction and in burial tombs. A hardy technique, it resisted the effects of sun, salt and wind, wax was painted onto wood, which is a support Djamel Tatah knew well, before he began using stretched canvas. The painter mastered this specific skill very quickly, with results outlasting death and the profane. Wax has a covering energy, masking and veiling, contrasting amber and brilliance, opacity and transparency, lending itself particularly well to pearlescent faces, wan and bluish, as much as they ease glazing, these subtly changeling layers of colour, seemingly monochrome ghosts of background, only seemingly.

A lunar universe

Djamel Tatah began painting in the early 80s, fraying his way at a time of Neo-expressionism, exploring the depths of colorfield, a sui generis expression, which conjugates moonlight. The artist’s work is initiated upon photographic souvenirs, of a personal collection of images which his painting reminiscences. By extension, he represents individuals as they are, as they are underneath the masks of personal feelings, with stoic expression, in plain garb, without redundancy or decorative effect. His models are a generic representation of people, and their inconsequential gestures, not of achievement or self-conscious feelings.

Of man’s destiny and his burden

Painting is a world of its own. Solemnly present, moonlit and pregnant, and yet so close to human detachment. There is definitely an artist behind all this, not a ghost. "I love films that resemble that which they speak of," said Francis Ford Coppola, while I like painting that speak by themselves. What Djamel Tatah paints resemble the theatre of our essential manners, in a choreography of ordinary bodies, translated with such beauty that small gests become significant. Without illusion, without dissipation, his painting speaks of being without yearning to exist; being in life at the very least, walking, roving, sleeping, willingly living the world at a distance. Such as these figures’ bowed heads, the look of others weighing down, the nagging individual memory that each and everyone carries, and all of humankind’s past. We are up against this modern swamp, of painting which measures itself against its own past, of being without extreme victory, nothing can escape us now. Besides, how could one escape an immense monochrome spread, an insular space, when the rules are already made as those as soon as we arrive, the painter orientating the models in a predisposed and finished format. Contemporary figures pose with the calm languor of immortality, their black attire suitable for all ages. With this laconic and apparently disillusioned disposition, each is a self sufficient being in a life which could be that of another, free of excitable passion and ordinary intrigue. “One and one make one," concluded Serge Reggiani by this equation in "Les Séquestrés d’Altona." Satin faces, such as Pierrot’s coat or Arlequin’s smock, retain neither the brilliance of arrogant laughter nor sly smile or livid anger. Neutral, an impartial actor, sometimes the model rests at the edge of the frame, at a point of abdication, but always remains disinterested in material objectives of which none are found here.

The first photo having served as a model for this business of portraits, or one should say, the model of models, is a portrait of the artist’s father in the company of his two uncles, one with the traditional fez hat.. The photo was sent to the family in the 1950s, a familiar photo of three Algerian immigrants. To have ones picture taken with others is to show oneself less alone, having companionship, it is to reassure oneself. Being far from ones own, feeling homesick, the absence of loved ones, invites melancholy, the singular expression of these people. Melancholy does not communicate the sad destiny of man; it is his burden, the inevitable hell of expatriates, and expatriates of another time. Identical to a nomad’s desert, blue knight in the Western Sand Sea, nothing, in this painting, proffers neither shade nor obstacle, not even the frame. It offers its habitants, nothing more than the isolated space of plain and nude painting. Being there demonstrates the trial of presence in gesture, without distraction, calm and upstanding. Leaving the picture’s In Petto, something mysterious tied to painterly tradition, and determines that a world has a colour, its inner light, and that humankind, indigenous to these surfaces, beneath this marble mask has no other reason than to be.