Dalila Dalléas Bouzar

"Dalila Dalléas Bouzar has always been a draughtswoman. She first trained in biology before discovering painting during a workshop in Berlin. Having become a permanent challenge for her, she enrolled at the Beaux-Arts de Paris to perfect this practice which became her preferred medium. Her figurative style, at the crossroads of realism and fantasy, rejects the authority of a too sharp drawing in favour of an unlimited experimentation of colours and a contrasting treatment of light. From the political to the historical, from the biological to the psychological, her work questions on several levels the powers of pictorial representation, against all expressionist or illustrative tendencies. Her obsession with painting bodies and faces (her own as well as those of others) reflects her desire to consider the portrait as a means of identity investigation or critical expression of relationships of domination, whether patriarchy or colonialism. Particularly sensitive to violence against bodies, she considers painting as a means of preserving, regenerating or reinventing their integrity. Her practice has broadened to performance and then textile art, two means of experiencing the body in ritual form and collective creation. Born in Oran, of Algerian parents, she draws from her double culture other relationships to the image, the object and the sacred, attentive to the cultural dissonance she creates as well as to the hegemony of Western representations in the history of art. She identifies above all with African women and their traditions and draws from Algerian memory the forms of a history of violence to which her work responds. From image to body, between the forces of the cosmos and the powers of the spirit, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar thus gives visibility, a luminous presence, to these wounded identities in order to better pay homage to their power." Florian Gaité ...