Béchir Boussandel’s Solo exhibition
Franco-Tunisian artist Béchir Boussandel lives and works in Lille, France. Boussandel graduated as a painter from the Dunkirk School of Fine Arts. His practice raises questions of identity, the nature of space of time and the time of space. Boussandel is preoccupied with the borders and boundaries that he perceives between public and private spaces. The artist foregrounds this duality through the representation of everyday objects that function in relation to territory, mobility, or habitat.
Here are a few highlights of Béchir Boussandel Solo’s exhibition at Tabari Artspace
Bechir Boussandel’s paintings raise questions relating to identity by destabilising notions of the space of time and the time of space. The artist is preoccupied with the boundaries that define public and private spaces and reflects upon the duality involving everyday objects and practices that relate to notions of territory, mobility, appropriation or habitat. Boussandel’s compositions regularly combine motifs absorbed from ornamentation and the miniature portrait.
Henri Focillon applies the term “vertigo of reduction” to the Western miniature, suggesting that there is a confusion as well as exaltation caused by this distortion of the size. In Béchir Boussandel’s paintings, the small and the wide are afforded equal capacity to conquer the vast. There is no hierarchy that orders those who occupy the place: his compositions part with any centrality to occupy the space. Neither foreground nor background is prioritised – everything is played out in the margins.
The works on canvas presented at Tabari Artspace witness Boussandel construct fictional and utopian scenes across various scales. He invites the viewer to journey through an unfamiliar landscape – a survey of the land – with the notions of territories and travel through space and time central to the series.
Boussandel’s palette of fire oranges and reds speaks of twilight – a moment of the day when one is suspended waiting for the sky to touch the earth yet his landscapes are composed intentionally without a horizon line. Desert plant life that can flourish in harsh climatic conditions – palms and cacti – as well as migrating birds and levitating fruit, freed from the fixture of the soil, are also recurring motifs within Boussandel’s compositions.
Boussandel is preoccupied by the borders and boundaries which he perceives between public and private spaces. The artist foregrounds this duality through the representation of everyday objects, characters and creatures that operate in relation to territory, mobility, or habitat.
“For me, painting is comparable to a territory, my territory, where the layers of paint are like geological strata. It is a hymn to colour.”
Tabari Art Space
Location: THE GATE VILLAGE BLDG.3 LEVEL 2 DIFC, Gate Village, Bld 3, Podium Level – Dubai – United Arab Emirates
Duration: 1 February – 27 February