Benanteur’s own Imaginary by Raoul-Jean Moulin

‘Although you hide away from my eyes in the invisible, My heart watches your arising, in the distance, from faraway’.  (Al-Hallaj)

     Where are we? Within which painting? It is as though the Nympheas’ fractured ripples came up through sleeping waters and had suddenly taken over everything right across the surface enlivening it totally, from one end to the other of its organic substance… Yet here, unlike the flamboyant gardens and ponds composed and designed by the man in Giverny, the painter subjects us absolutely to another sort of mirage, arising from rock and sand, dust and ashes. Within the blond and ochre hues of the soaked earth, could it be the sudden overspill of an oasis’ backwater? Or a sedimentary cliff blistered by the sun and the arid wind that exhumes and gnaws at it? Could it be a piece of old leather embroidered and discoloured, an illuminated parchment which is now only a palimpsest scarred by time, ravaged by the sun’s biting rays, seeking in the scars’ tracks a glimmer of schist, a coppery layer, a reddish gold streak, or is it maybe just a wall made up of narrowly adjusted stones, a decrepit skin of whitewash, or else that tired old basket outworn through use and yet always ready to shelter the best fruit?

   Selon Charef (1960) is the title of a painting done in memory of his late brother, in which the painter seeks his sources in the very heart of his original culture, rooted in an Arabic-Islamic tradition. At the very core of the painter’s work, providing texture for the intricacies of a chromatic scale reduced to its essence, carrying within it all the violence of a masterful gesture purely in order to let the tenuous and persistent rhythm rise from the depths, wherein varied cadences resonate their vibrating waves within the fizzing light spaces. A limitless and distance-less painting, a monumental detail beyond any kind of deliberate framing, which breathes and resounds deeply before us just like the martyred earth and which I believe to be the painter’s genuine self-portrait. Undoubtedly, this man’s work never went so far, within his rigorous and scrupulous approach, as far as the extreme starkness where painting unclothes itself and shows itself within the abrupt truth of its previous territory. Selon Charef, coming at the end of a first and fundamental period, is not closure but the anticipation of a great œuvre.

Born in Mostaganem in 1931, Abdallah Benanteur was brought up in close contact with Algerian music and lute players. Throughout his adolescence, a deep friendship developed between him and the late Mohammed Khadda, a painter and writer, with whom he shared a passion for the poetic illuminations of Al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Omar Khayyam and Saadi, as well as for Cézanne’s visual and constructive order, whose influence they discovered in books of reproductions. They travelled all around the Mediterranean together, through the scrublands and heather of the mountainy slopes, which plunge and vanish into the empyrean blue of the sea; they went as far as the edges of the Sahara, where the world’s appearances seem to dissolve in the murmurs and gentle luminous shimmering of a space announcing the desert. They went to Algiers, in 1948, where they discovered painting’s past history. And that was where, during those hard and yet promising years, in those poor areas, deeply impregnated with the history and the imaginary of their own people, that they really learned, in their open air university, that they became painters and gave themselves the necessary means to achieve their end.

In the same way, concerning Benanteur, it was not so much what he learned during five years, in the Fine Arts school in Oran, about drawing, painting or sculpture, nor even in the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1953, but rather his assiduous attendance of the Old Masters in the Louvre, which led him to pursue his chosen path, and whose risks he had already accepted as given. Later on, several journeys in Italy and Spain, then in the Netherlands, in Belgium and in Germany, led him closer to other museums’ treasures, and also provoked some emphases or accelerations in his own work’s evolution.

The period of the national Algerian insurrection, at the end of the fifties and early sixties, in Paris, Benanteur lived his exile and his country’s conflicts through his own painting. He deliberately chose a sensitive non-figuration, so as to remain on the look-out, always available for the merest visually remembered sensation, the painter allowed the wellspring of his fatherland to come through the very matter of his painting. The day’s languor or its swift decline, provides the mental area from which spring forth and multiply the scarred tissues of the parched earth, crackling and splintering, with its lateritic redness, where the greyish walls split apart, and founder, increasing the path’s dust, when the cities’ raw bricks turn pink or mauve according to dawn or dusk, or when the sand powders, suspended in mid air in the crackling and brilliant pallor in noontime’s torrid sunlight.

Then the painting darkens, stirring within itself and, in deepest black, uncertain figurations, tumultuous confrontations, are to be found which burn and flare up, like Le retour (1977) and Le départ de Halouma n°5 (1980), in memory of his mother, in which we find once more the breaking morsels of earth and the avid, porous and diaphanous walls open to the indescribable golden shimmer of the East.

As a visible or invisible presence, the figure haunts the long journeying of Benanteur’s œuvre and pursues it within its folds and unexpected surges, conferring upon it gravitas and the rhythmic, deambulatory cadences of modal singing. This apparition continues with the processional suite of the Errantes (1972-1974), the Visiteuses (1974-1976), which take on indecisive forms in the bluish, violet tinged mist, rising from the darkest depths. A night-time procession, escaping from a dreamworld, floating in transparencies, in the slow and intense resurfacing of colour to overcome forgetfulness. From then onwards, and even more so in the nineties, after a transition going from Bois d’amour (1980) to the Ophélies’ diptych (1984), colour increasingly enlarged its scope and strengthened both its matter and its inflections, all the while developing the lyrical dimension of its visual expression.

Benanteur’s painting, renewed year after year by his growing knowledge of museums, and freed of the parallel experience of engraving, little by little gave up the discipline of stripping down, and gave itself up wholeheartedly, finding a new landscape, not a stranger to the previous one, although very different in its essence, like another side to his quest, where he attained a certain form of beatitude, a kind of heavenly garden reconstituting by combining them, the thousand and one mornings of the world. Here, from one triptych to another, Arabia (1984), Les élus (1986), L’élu (1987), the figure is no more than a clue, a mark, indicating the measure of man’s coming to grips with the world and its elements. An enchanted earth, like in the diptych La fugue (1988), no longer altered but bathed by the rising and setting sunlight, overrun by the coolness of rivers across the countryside, hiding its sources in the prairies’ dense grass, and inside the mossy rocks of the dark and deep forests.

With short, precise, repetitive or contrariwise gestures, the painter mingles within his colours the sum of impulses he can feel stirring and growing in reality’s most secret body. So, the breadth and spread of his touch be it light or heavy, provides the mobility of reflections and nuances, the super-impression of visual sensations, heavy or limpid tonalities scattered throughout the space, a prodigious mosaic whose infinite motion is marvellous and fascinating to behold and gaze upon. A continual changeover runs through the strokes, ordaining its regimen and the flowering of its allusive ambivalence, fusing the elements, matters and its kingdoms, meanwhile mastering the power of its chromatic orchestration, according to a radiant poetics of meditation and jubilation, which reaches its culmination in the return with the double diptych of the Visiteuses à Brocéliande (1989).

Afterwards – and maybe because of it? – Benanteur frequently felt the imperious need to multiply versions, variants, or phenomena based on the same project. Diptychs, triptychs, even sometimes-monumental polyptychs, do not seek throughout his work, to seize the progression of an event through various evolutionary phases, to undertake juxtapositions, or comparative confrontations of several events, their allegorical and glorifying apotheosis… He only aimed at defining and revealing two or more states, as one says of an etching, of the same visual fact being carried out: for instance the ten periods of Illuminations d’Al-Hallaj (1981), a visionary decade during which the soul’s dialectics was at work. Through ever-stronger scansions ripped from the poet’s otherworld, the coloured song reached its highest polyphonic amplitude, concerted in various levels of painting, and alternatively or simultaneously composed from variegated flowerings, with a lyrical deployment sometimes brought to an expansive form of baroque.

Among the contemporary painters of the Maghreb, Abdallah Benanteur occupies a singular and exemplary place from an international point of view, through his legitimate and radical refusal of any form of academism, be it figurative, abstract, or post-modern, as well as any folkloric arrangements which would betray the authentic Arabic-Islamic tradition, which invariably ends up, notwithstanding its manner or know-how, within a reductive and normalising impoverishment of genuine popular creativity.

On the other hand, he called upon painting, to endow it with a gesture taken from calligraphic principles, and which he always maintained concise, dense, imperiously rhythmic, never tempted to let itself be enclosed or subjected to the sign. It launched forth into the movements of a metaphorical and non-symbolical writing, delving deep into the painter’s background to freight itself with meaning and manifest itself in the men’s world, its only aim being to awaken in each of us the celebration of the imaginary. Because it was in his terrible loneliness, his obstinate silence, his abrupt mysticism and his instinct for transcendence, that he was able to find his genius, his passion for the upsurge and his innate taste for the stroke and the incision, his friend Rachid Boujedra wrote about him in 1987.

Translated from French by Ann Cremin.

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