« It is the fire of a volcano that absolutely must come to light, because it is an absolute necessity in its organisation to shine, to illuminate, to astonish the world »
Théodore Géricault
The painted bodies of Dalila Dalléas Bouzar are bearers of memory. The unbleached canvas is a first skin that allows us to reach other memorial dimensions. The exhibition presented at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury unfolds a compilation of memories drawn from far away and mixed where flesh predominates. Here, solitary portraits, there, imposing frescos. In each image, a sacred fire crackles. Clouds of colour or chromatic prisms crystallise the strange: a symbolic language appears. What reflections emanate from the crystal? What buried sounds resonate in this pigmented shell? What do these painted faces mean, crossed out by the bright colours?
The artist operates a mise en abyme: as in her performances where she wears a combative position, the paint becomes a second skin and catalyses the struggle. The drapes and tentacles surround majestic bodies. They radiate a powerful energy, as in the embroideries of the Coeur pur series, where the golden thread embraces a black velvet that hosts victorious beings, supernatural forces riding a unicorn surrounded by rainbows. The paintings reveal a common gesture; in turn, their characters challenge us, stare at us or stare intently at us. In front of a hilly landscape, a little masked girl advances towards us, her fingers clutching a sword. The bodies are erect, physical. In the background, the painter's movement takes over the canvas.
Elsewhere, a self-portrait shows the artist's obstructed face; a heart seems to help her breathe. This organic evocation recalls the early aspirations of Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, who devoted herself to biology before studying at the École des Beaux-arts in Paris. Nourished by the structure of classical painting, she began a dialogue with Eugène Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger. As an Algerian artist and woman, she intended to forge new symbols that would act on what she called the "territories of power". One of the large paintings reinvents the composition: if the characters of the Femmes d'Alger are transfigured, the attitudes remain. The painting allows the artist to return to the sources of representation by acting on the past with contemporary motifs. The accumulation of details saturates the canvas. Perspective is recognised. The layers of light cut through the pictorial narrative and create depth. A large window transports us to a black sky. In contrast to Delacroix, who enclosed his models in an atmosphere suffocated by hookah fumes, the story opens up to the outside world. Here, the white maid is looked at by a black woman. Orientalist fantasies are transcended. Almost devoid of decoration, the second canvas reveals the sensuality of four heavy bodies, sagging after the embrace. Only Delacroix's drapery remains and surrounds a floating atmosphere where the bodies are in suspension. Their femininity is exacerbated, troubled and ambivalent.
A more ghostly creature inhabits the images. In a painting from the Baigneuses series, we observe the fall of a light being, its passage is furtive. It seems to fall from the sky and fly away. His chimerical presence, sometimes in the background, punctuates other images in the series My Life is a Miracle. Behind the artist, perched on a triangle, an apparition keeps watch. Her spectral gaze has been with the painter for a long time. Dalila Dalléas Bouzar chooses to show those she calls 'entities' for the first time. Timeless, neither man nor woman, they do not belong to any defined field of representation. The gouaches on black Canson reveal these grey and golden totemic beings, associated with the sky or fire. They are carried along by waves, by breaths. The drawing is freer and more naive and is based on the intimacy of the artist's line.
Dalila Dalléas Bouzar now operates a synthesis between drawing and painting. By reinterpreting a major painting, the artist returns to the steps of the history of female representations. She emancipates herself from the canons of a grandiloquent painting and nevertheless retains the celebration of bodies, the mastery of balance, the poetic freshness of a rebellious gesture.
Élise Girardot, August 2022
Art critic, member of AICA
