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Jérôme Poggi is pleased to present its first solo show dedicated to Djamel Tatah (France, 1959), who officially joined the gallery in September 2018. In partnership with Ben Brown Fine Arts, the exhibition gathers a body of recent works.

Djamel Tatah has also been invited by the Musée des Arts et Métiers to create a unique project in the chancel of the Saint-Martin-des-Champs Priory. Set in the church choir, the large-scale installation was produced with Atelier Michael Woolworth.

« This exhibition is a glimpse in eight works of my experience as a painter, which revolves around recurring themes (war, solitude, aimlessness) that express my relationship to the world.»
– Djamel Tatah

Facing the world.
Djamel Tatah and the eloquence of silence

Djamel Tatah is a 21st-century pictorial pigment painter working in a pixelated and virtually connected society. Using a classic and ‘academic’ medium, seen as obsolete by some, Tatah insolently expresses the significance of paintings anchored in a contemporaneity that is defined by increasing levels of interconnectivity and immediacy. Yet his paintings emphasise a certain solitude achieved by assembling selected fragments of isolated human figures that suggest the need to calmly take a critical introspective view in this modern and bustling world. Rather like a film-maker, Djamel Tatah assembles selected sequences from the physical and virtual world. From his personal image bank, made up of his own photographs and common iconographic sources collected from the internet and the press, his artworks are inhabited by life-sized figures, who are created and called upon to accompany the artist’s reflections on the world. Tatah reworks these sources by directly projecting them onto the canvas in an attempt to transcribe and embody, through the act of painting, a different relationship with the world. Far from wishing to condemn, his works ask us to think calmly and intensely about these reflections on canvas with and against the screen of time. Looking at Tatah’s work, we are overwhelmed both by the scale of the life-size watching subjects but also by the sense of isolation, and the striking and manifest silence. This meditative silence and solitude is reminiscent of the suspended time expressed in Edward Hopper’s works. Yet the artistic approach of this Franco-Algerian artist is not the same; here, the realism of the setting is outside our frame of vision favouring large coloured, sometimes binary areas, where the pale bodies, always dressed in dark garments, are placed solely to preserve the structure of the canvas on a human scale. The painted characters and watching individuals are painted side by side – but not completely together. Thus a paradox emerges when our gaze is directed in front of or against these paintings, creating a catharsis and a Brechtian distancing effect, which is both familiar and distant, and singular and diluted in this preoccupying world.

Following an invitation from the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Djamel Tatah has once again created an artistic intervention somewhere in between – between a fall and flight. On lengths of coloured fabric, the artist has depicted bodies draped in black that are bathed by the light that floods the nave of the Chapelle Saint-Martin. These engraved bodies, references from his artworks painted in the 2010s, are recreated using a technique that combines painting, block-printing and sculpture. Looking at these two-dimensional surfaces, the viewer’s gaze can turn to either side of the lines of highlights of colors where the light bends. There are no idols here but rather a corporeality shown at the heart of its human condition yet suspended in time and space in this place of contemplation. The floating bodies, distanced and overhanging the looking subject, are thus halted at a certain moment in their elevation – threatening to land on us. From the Galerie Poggi, the experience of the gaze itself plays with a variation of scale, focal points and framing and it is perhaps the identification of the figures and the salient details that guide us towards identifiable spaces. From the silence of the isolated figures thus emerges the eloquence of being in the world. Without entering into an ethereal or highly philosophical analysis, what the experienced viewer sees here is the Dasein order formulated by Heidegger; being in the world where existentialism provides an entry point for the appreciation of the subjects, Untitled, and a priori out of context. But if you look closely at the six paintings chosen by the artist, this exhibition takes us to the heart of history and what is happening in the world today. The source images from which Djamel Tatah draws his inspiration come from nonhierarchical reports of contemporary tragedies. A jumble of suggested and inhabited figures appear: a « man of the streets », – homeless in New York photographed in 1992 by the artist -, a mask removed from a sculpture of Palmyra destroyed by Daesh, a lie extracted from a photograph of the war in Iraq, a dead body « resuscitated » from the detail of a fresco by Piero della Francesca, or hitists [NB: a term used to refer to loitering youths in North Africa] outside the framework of time, and who are always and inexorably rejected on the edge of the city. The artist repeats motifs, he reframes and reacts with other sources and other coloured screens, as if to find a way to decompose and deconstruct a certain social, political and gregarious violence that silently drives the world. The artist is not informed by nostalgia but rather ‘a positive energy’, a relational melancholy (D. Tatah, Art Press, 2004) highlighting the anxiety of an oppressive world that he calmly tries to understand through the silence of painting. The eyes of these characters, sometimes a reference from great works of art history, sometimes taken from the theatre of contemporary tragic reality, are alternately fleeting, closed or focused on the spectator reminding us that they too sometimes look at us but, above all, might – like one of these figures – touch us with their fingertips, or even catch us …

Emilie Goudal March 2019