Djamel Tatah confronted visitors to his recent show with an image of the aftermath of violence. Rendered at human scale, Tatah’s subject in this large-scale oil-and-wax painting (Untitled, 2020) would have stood as tall as a grown man, but, like Manet’s The Dead Toreador, 1864, he lies fallen. The Matisse-like outline that delineates the figure pulses against the background: two matte fields, one of midnight blue and one of crimson. The composition is a testament to human tragedy and a pointed question for the onlooker: What do you do in those wide fields of color the artist leaves otherwise empty? The viewer becomes a witness and is dared to look away. It’s an assertive strategy, equal parts political and devotional. Two decades ago, Tatah was practically the only significant artist in France committed to painting the human form. Today, of course, he shares company with a new generation of figurative painters, many of them former students of his at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Here, two canvases hung individually in a pair of small sanctuary-like spaces embracing the works’ silence. They picture women, shoulders up, with undulating waves of dark-brown hair and round pink lips. Their eyes turn away from the viewer’s. Two larger canvases reiterate this denial of the gaze. Women obscured by hair or veils, in robes depicted with the artist’s signature dramatic folds, cover their faces with open hands. Theirs are portraits of agony or shame or a simple refusal to be seen. In another canvas, a woman’s earth-toned headscarf and robes echo a dark expanse that runs in a horizontal band across the bottom of a square canvas. She seems to be digging her gray-white fingertips and toes into this field of rich color—as if to crawl back into the material of painting itself.
On the canvas hung at the back of the austere rectangular gallery, where the altar of a church would be, we found a bald man dressed in a rumpled gray suit, his feet cropped off at the bottom of the composition. In fact, none of the figures, now consistently rendered life size, is pictured whole—all are sliced by the edge of Tatah’s canvases. On the other hand, the absence of a horizon line allows the viewer, or perhaps the artist himself, a way into each composition, unhindered by the illusion of a separate landscape—better to chase his subjects into an immense and impossible space. Five canvases, all Untitled, 2022, reiterate a female figure, her mouth subtly shifting shape and her hands gradually rising from her sides. She could be singing a song of lament.
In addition to icons of European art history, Tatah also appropriates images clipped from the news. In a recent interview with Michel Hilaire, curator of a concurrent exhibition of the artist’s work in Tatah’s adopted hometown of Montpellier, France, the artist refers to himself as a “mutant,” continuing, “I know where I come from, but not where I’m going.” Born in the South of France to Algerian parents, Tatah is attentive to the ravages of colonialism and the massive loss of life as millions of migrants attempt to cross the Mediterranean. Communicating in the language of painting, Tatah’s canvases give voice.
