Encountering the world begins with the hands. Although Dalila Dalléas Bouzar has gained recognition in recent years for her engaged performances, textile installations and embroidery work, drawing and painting remain at the very heart of her practice. Everything begins with the body – her own and that of others – which she activates, sets in motion, and represents.
In her drawing series Rencontres, which she began in 2016, different subjects coexist, all expressing a “moving towards.” It is about presenting oneself, of welcoming others with all the ambiguity that may entail. The living repel and attract one another—humans, animals—cultures overlap, and even ancestors, bones and skeletons emerge from the pencil, drawn in white on black paper. The line establishes contact, while colour arises for its own sake, standing out and asserting itself in a history of Western representation that the artist seeks to break down and open up, as when she reinterprets the subject of the Bather in one series. Delacroix thus becomes an important pictorial reference, enabling the artist, through her interpretation of Femmes d’Alger, to reclaim the notion of Orientalism. The romantic painter's roots in his time, who also painted Scenes from the Massacres of Chios, also touched Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, who with Femme de Gaza seeks to express a solidarity that must find other ways of addressing the public. A way of thinking about painting that does not necessarily seek pathos and does not confine the victims within a composition. By leaving a large part of the canvas blank, by painting a text by Mahmoud Darwish in the manner of an inexorable wave, the artist seeks the poetry of saying something else, of going beyond the image.
The sun, hovering yellow and naïve with its perfectly straight rays, carries something of the power of a child’s drawing and the fixity of a tragedy. The two figures—a woman in a black shawl and a child wearing a helmet—possess an enigmatic quality. The artist subverts direct frontal representation, works with oblique perspectives, and plays with the viewer’s projection. It is not just a matter of defending oneself, in another of her portraits, for which the poet Julie Diabira posed, the pencil overlays the machete. Other means of taking a stance must be found.
Portraits and self-portraits are ways for Dalila Dalléas Bouzar to claim her place in the world. Whether she depicts herself with the words “Fuck you” or “I love beauty,” a genuine intimacy emerges from her paintings. The pink she favours in her work alternately softens the charcoal-like lines that suggest volume and gives form through their vibration and depth. Pink is a carnal colour which, set against the raw canvas, creates a vibration, a subtle quiver. Leaning towards orange, it is the hue closest to dawn.
