Born in Oran, Algeria, in 1974. Lives and works in Bordeaux, France.
While always interested in drawing, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar initially studied biology. After discovering painting at a workshop in Berlin, however, it quickly became a never-ending challenge. Accepted at the prestigious Beaux-arts in Paris, she perfected her technique in what became her preferred medium. Her figurative style, at the crossroads of realism and dreams, rejects the rigid authority of overly meticulous drawing in favor of boundless experimentation in color and chiaroscuro. Moving from politics to history, biology to psychology, her work investigates the power of pictorial representation at different levels by going against the expressionistic and illustrative tide. She translates her desire to understand the portrait as a means of investigating identity and an expressive critique of relationships of domination – from the patriarchy to colonialism – into an obsession with painting the body and faces, hers and others’. Particularly sensitive to the violence inflicted on bodies, she sees painting as a means of preserving, regenerating, and reinventing corporeal integrity, while the extension of her practice to performance and textiles has allowed her to introduce different means of ritualistically experiencing her body within a collective creativity. Dalila Dalléas Bouzar was born in Oran, Algeria, to Algerian parents and grew up in France, a bi-cultural background that gives her a different relationship with images, objects and the sacred, and heightened her awareness of both the cultural dissonances she creates and the hegemony of Western representation in the history of art. Identifying above all with African women and their traditions, she is fascinated by the different forms of violence within the collective Algerian memory to which her work responds. From the image to the body, between cosmic forces and spiritual powers, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar offers a visibility to these wounded identities, a luminous presence, better to pay tribute to their power.
Dalila Dalléas Bouzar sees the pictorial as a means of emancipation that enables her both to intervene in the collective imagination and act within the knowledge economy. This liberating relationship to her medium also applies to her subjects, who are mainly female and portrayed in positions of strength. Whether warriors, princesses, witches, or exalted anonymous women – all reveal a dignity, grace, and readiness to dispose freely of their bodies. The recurrence of pink flesh in her paintings, which complements their earth-colored tones, nods to the transgression of certain taboos, linked to sexuality or cannibalism, as if painting permitted the representation of unconstrained femininity, confronted by its own prohibitions. This willingness to turn the spotlight on those whom history has relegated to the shadows – women, children, the colonized – also allows her paintings to become new spaces of projection. With her Christ-like Omar, who has once again become Middle Eastern (Omar project), her reappropriation of the theme of The Bathers, and her reworking of Femmes d’Alger (Women of Algiers) after Delacroix and Picasso, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar has created new means of identification that resist dominant representations. Like the penguins in Tierra del Fuego that she adopted as standard bearers during the initial stages of her artistic career, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar is creating an oeuvre of resistance, opposing the memory of lived violence through the strength of those who resist it.
This desire to capture a face or bring it out into the light does not prevent the artist from sometimes working at the limits of the visible. She often prefers to offer hints rather than reveal all, as her use of the faded, the unfinished and the out-of-focus demonstrates. In Princesse, the traces of violence and the colonial context found in archive images are removed to highlight the energy and dignity of the photographed women, who are suddenly extracted from their condition of victims. In the drawings Algérie année 0 (Algeria Year Zero), images from the country’s war of independence and its “Black Decade” of civil war between 1991 and 2002 are treated in fluorescent yellow, a choice of color that allows her both to underline and disguise the violence of the real and to place the viewer in an uneasy position between embarrassment and fascination. The use of bright, saccharine colors allows her to sugarcoat her visual language and so draw attention to subjects who are less conscious and so more difficult to represent. Impulses, anxieties, obsessions, dreams from the unconscious all find form in her images, in particular in the shapes of a house or closed bedroom, both visual metaphors of mental space.
Since 2015, the image of the body in her work has given way to performance, which has become a necessary form of self-expression for the artist. In the urgency of the moment, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar organizes her time, space, and relationship with the public. Her signature work, Inner Past, for example, responds to a need she felt to burn her personal notebooks and to share this initiatory auto-da-fé collectively. Paying particular attention to light and color, she sees performance as a continuation of her painting, sometimes even combining the two (Studio). Through objects (rugs, incense) and symbols (a cross), elements of finery (masks, jewelry, make-up, trinkets), noble materials (gold, ceramics), and natural elements (water and fire), she summons the forces of ritual and mobilizes a spirituality that aims to have real-world effects. Following on from these works, the artist’s more recent projects – Innocentes and Coeur pur (Pure Heart) – reconnect her in an alternative way to an ancestral tradition whose memory she keeps alive, even as she remains interested in reinventing signs and playing with symbols embedded in the collective consciousness. Inspired by the body, the art of Dalila Dalléas Bouzar works to repair the link – too-often broken – between the infinity of the cosmos and the intimacy of the human.
Florian Gaité
Translate by Tom Ridgway