PARIS.- Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is presenting “Eden”, a solo exhibition from Franco Algerian artist Dalila Dalléas Bouzar in its Parisian showroom, from 12 February to 19 March, 2021.

The artworks in Eden pursue and amplify the research displayed during the 2020 Abidjan exhibition 2020 “Innocente” where the artist unveiled a series of works depicting the various ages of woman, among other subjects.

In the series of paintings Sorcières (Witches) as in the monumental tapestry Adama, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar puts women’s bodies at the center of a history made up of transmissions, knowledge, power and representations.

While Dalila Dalléas Bouzar’s work will be exhibited in numerous French institutions at the beginning of this year, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury wishes to create links through her highly rich art, which lies at the intersection of very intimate and current line of research, of the collective Algerian conscience and that of women along with the representation of minorities in the Western art canon and psyche.

Working on drawing since her childhood, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar initially studied biology before discovering painting during a Berlin workshop. It soon became a permanent challenge, hence her decision to enroll at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in order to perfect this practice that became her favorite medium. Her figurative style, at the crossroads of realism and onirism, refuses the authority inherent in a too clear drawing for the benefit of a limitless experimentation of colors and of a contrasted treatment of light. From the political to the historical, from the biological to the psychological, her art continually questions through different layers the powers of pictural representation, at the opposite of any expressionist or illustrative tendency.

Especially sensitive to corporal violence, she considers painting as a way to preserve, regenerate or reinvent the body’s integrity. Her practice has widened to performance and textile art, two ways to test one’s body in the ritual form and collective creation. Born in Oran to Algerian parents, from this double culture she takes a different approach to the image, the object and the sacred, attentive to the cultural dissonances that she creates in response to the hegemony of Western d depictions in the History of Art. Identifying herself first and foremost with African women and their traditions, she seeks in the collective Algerian conscience, forms of a history of violence which her art aims to respond to.

Pictorial representation constitutes an assured means of emancipation for Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, enabling an intervention through imaginary collectives as well as to act in the economy of knowledge. This liberating relationship towards her medium is also appropriate for her subjects, mostly feminine, depicted in a position of power. Warriors, princesses, witches or sublimated ordinary women, they all display dignity, grace and a tendency to own their bodies.

Since 2015, the image of the body has been replaced by performance, a medium that imposed itself to the artist like a necessity. In the urgency of the real, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar organizes her time, her space and her relationship towards the audience. Paying particular attention to light and colors, she thinks of performance as an extension of her painting, when she does not combine the two.