In some forty paintings and an installation of engraved and painted canvas strips suspended in the height of its atrium, the Fabre Museum gives the space it deserves to the partition of figures, colors and emptiness that has occupied Djamel Tatah since the 1980s. Take a good look at the Self-portrait in Mansoura (1986), at the entrance to the exhibition with other "historic" works. Between the diaphanous figure with its absorbed gaze and the architectural motif of a column, like a background to his thoughts, a blue panel just brushed over the ochre of the background links one to the other, keeping them irremediably separate. Everything is there of the work of Djamel Tatah. "In fact, you make the same thing since your beginnings?" More laughing than the figures of his paintings, the painter admits it all the more willingly that this thought does not spoil the view of his work, until the most recent achievements that occupy most of his exhibition in Montpellier.


Extract from the article by Tom Laurent published in the N°104 de la revue Art Absolument. Published February 3, 2023

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