About forty paintings, populated by female or male anonymous human figures, gives to grasp the artist’s so singular language.
By Philippe DAGEN
Many artists hold the chronicle of their time by accumulating significant details and narrative elements. Thus operated Pop Art, in all its various European and North American variants. Conversely, it is works, much less numerous, which, although stripped of any detail and any story, are nonetheless in the exact image of their time. This reflection continues to come back in mind as we walk through the exhibition of Djamel Tatah at the Fabre Museum in Montpellier. These scenes have been seen, without stopping there. These attitudes, these situations, we know them. But they were taken in the flow of everyday life, while they present themselves here stripped of their circumstances, in a state of visual nudity which makes them terribly significant.
Although it begins in the second half of the 1980s and goes to works completed in 2022, this exhibition is not a chronological retrospective, but the ordered deployment of around forty paintings, most Or very large format, in an architecture and according to a hanging designed mainly by the artist himself. Due to this character that is both tightened and meditated by the exhibition, it is therefore a manifesto: the manifesto of what one could call the “tatah form”.
This form seems easy to describe. Each painting consists of one or more female or male human figures, dressed soberly, placed in a space which is not defined by objects, walls or a landscape, but by colorful surfaces cut by orthogonal geometry. This system was established a little before 1990. Djamel Tatah, born in 1959, in Saint-Chamond (Loire), pupil in the Fine Arts of Saint-Etienne from 1981 to 1986, therefore built it very early, with clarity and a firmness that did not deny themselves. There is an enigma there, that of an artist finding his own form so quickly, which does not similarly become known and proving to be so many developments.
distance between beings
Today, as four decades ago, the works of Tatah, these are, in fact, these human figures and these monochrome areas, oil and wax on canvases fixed on boards recovered in its early days, on Chassis canvases afterwards. The clothes are reduced to the simplest notation: black or dark brown fabrics marked by lighter sinuous folds, almost white sometimes. The faces are also white, shaped by bluish shadows, with tight lips and black eyes. Most of the time, these beings are young. At least their features are not marked by time.
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