AFTER a figurative period when landscape was the principal subject, my painting became abstract because of a logic it bears from the beginning. Nevertheless, it didn’t lose its main subject. Instead, it is yet deepening it. Here are trunks, branches or stones. There, moss or butterflies wings. Expressing the essence of anonymous and mute things of nature, that is the preoccupation of some artists of our century : Willem de Kooning, Soulages, Paul Jenkins, Prassinos, Mark Tobey, Estève, Manessier… I am in this tendency which rejuvenates our vision of nature, which deepens it while analysing and synthesising its most anodyne and microscopic elements. The image I give is cognitive and poetic at the same time.

In 1983, I wrote in my journal: "This expression is doubt, quest. What I'm looking for, what I'll always look for, what I urgently claim is this quest which is doubt; doubt about the unknown that obsesses me, doubt which I know is more a despair than a hope. It does not matter much whether I fail where others have succeeded or whether I succeed where others have failed. What I want from my painting is that an answered question always brings another obsessing question which will keep me searching and searching. My quest is that of a permanently dissatisfied, to permanently revive my astonishment when the answer is found, and then, just after, start searching again, unsatisfied.

      "My painting might be an answer or a solution to a metaphysical or psychological problem, or the two at the same time… The greatest moment for me is not when the canvas is finished but when I paint, the moment where, at an hour to frighten ghosts, I decide to paint, where I continue to paint, knowing that art is a sacrifice before being a gift. Moreover, in painting there are solely risks but this word nor the word sacrifice never lied heavy on my mind."

      I refused to show my work and continued to live art like a battlefield for years and years, never demanding, always questioning myself, as if born for a permanent dissatisfaction. Extract from my journal : "No, I don't want to communicate through painting - at least this is not my premium quest - but "to be". I monologue with myself through the gestures of the hands, of my whole body; an obsessing monologue requiring that I be lucid and dreamy at the same time so that the essence of things projects on the canvas I've been struggling against for days and nights. But may be that all I project is no more than a shadow… Paintings allows me only to know my feebleness of a human being. It doesn't allow me to fly like a bird nor have the privilege of any other metamorphosis. When you paint, you become very small, particularly when colours start disobeying and refusing to offer you the image you expect though you know it at the tip of your finger.

      "I do not control the space I have created myself. Often, it even seems to me that this space has been created unwillingly, despite my will. Because it's never this image that I wanted but another, which vanished meanwhile and always refusing to come true. The one offered in exchange is a stimulating gift that keeps the quest going on once more. This is why I started beginning a canvas without any preconceived idea or prepared notion of what, when finished, my painting will be. I refused sketches, partitions and this is how I learnt what my inner world does resemble to and which, whether I liked it not, imposes itself in my painting.

      I refuse to elaborate any order in particular. That which, once again, imposes itself after a tough struggle against the resistances of the canvas, perpetuates the same reign of nature that is dominating my work since the beginning.
There must be an inner discipline which decides, a sort of synthesis of what concerns me and resembles me the most, and that takes control when I decide not to preconceive my work. I never wanted to have a style but solely being myself. Finally, I am sure that my painting is a remake of what has already been done ten thousands kilometres away or two million light years farther. Is this thus why the quest goes on?"

The fragrance of stones
and the fiery sun of Mitidja

      Finding a subject to my painting, even in the inert material of stones. A vast symbolic, first, that this stone which has conserved a human odour according to the legend of Prometheus. Nevertheless, I am not interested in myths related to the stone but in the pure sensations and emotions of the eye, of touching and smelling a stone can give, additionally to the poetic evocations it provides if you know how to look at the mineral with a fascinated and astonished eye.

      Opposite the stone, we are face to face with the secret life of the mineral, which is always strong though immobile, still and inert. In that brute cosmic material, in that speechless and nameless stone, is condensed to the infinite the secret force that directs the whole cosmos. There also lays the crude material, issued of the magma preceding the Big Bang, from which life came out with its rhythm and movement.

      Painting stones tells about the essential things of life and its origin but also about death. Because the stone is that thing which observes us with its still eyes, with its Gorgon face. But who, better than Roger Caillois, has spoken about stones with the language of words?

      If I am constantly in contact with nature, it is not for copying it but to understand what, in the order and colours of nature, possesses a permanent character. Because this part of the Mitidja where I was born and where I work has its own palette and tonalities. Now: trying to seize an order in its essence. Here, in that Mediterranean land, light is so vivid that it transforms objects and makes them unidentifiable. It envelops them with a sort of halo that makes them tremble and their contours vibrate. Everything seems unstable but everything is part of the whole totality. Under a fiery sun, the air is incandescent in summer when the yellows and browns burn amongst the greens. In winter, the forms are still trembling, perpetually unstable even though the light of a sunny day is covering them with a radiant glow.

      An amazed observer of these phenomena, I try, with the means of art, to render them, to translate them in their infinite fugitive transformation, their glowing, their secret relationships and accomplice interpenetrations, contrasts and harmonies… In their delicate movements evoking the subtle dance of poplar leaves. It is a huge program to try to list, catalogue, even a very few samples of this vast chromatic frame which defiles day by day upon the plain, upon mounts, hills and dales, in brown, yellow, green, white, pink and red games over a freshly ploughed field. The most varied chromatic spectrum I know is playing on me the trick of driving me mad… But I have no more the age of the juvenile fascination. Long before I accessed to a lucid amazement.

      My aim is knowledge, indeed. Nevertheless, the knowledge of it as well as the poetic metaphors my art demands. Impregnated of meditation and contemplation, my painting tries to be a translation of my permanent amazement before nature. It can be defined as impressionistic in the large meaning of the word, in this sense that it also tries to seize the fugacious impressions and transformations of nature along the seasons, as well as to grasp its secret sonorities and most outstanding rhythms. It is also via the ungraspable and fugacious characters that it reaches the permanent characters of nature.

      Here is the reign of calmness. Sometimes, a sidereal silence and others, nothing but a soft noise. Mysterious is the silence of this painting that abolishes austerity without searching exuberance. In west Mitidja where I was born, the plain meets the mountain. Two harmonious worlds that painting is inspired from… My art is a long and patient work on the visible materials of the world and elements because it is not only an intellectual quest but also linked to my deep love of nature requiring observation and meditation, too. "So that a dream goes on with enough constancy, so that it does not become the mere vacancy of a fugitive while, it is necessary that a material element gives it its own substance, its own rule, its specific "poetics", says G. Bachelard about poetic and literary art. And this "material element", I find it in nature, taken not only as a source of knowledge but also as the scene of his permanent astonishment and amazement. Because, in order to quote Bachelard again, "There must be a sentimental reason, a cause linked to the heart becomes a formal cause so that the art work gets the variety of the verb, the changing life of light"(2).    
     

The unconscious in action
Under the control of reason

     Sometimes my painting falls in psychic improvisation and instinctive invention as I do not totally reject the automatic writing of the surrealists, which is also part of Willem de Kooning's art process and whom I venerated in the eighties. Nevertheless, limits are fixed to that improvisation. Conscious and subconscious are constantly in equilibrium in my "démarche". In my work, spontaneous gestures sometimes exist but the process is always under control. Improvisation and voluntary action may combine to get the desired effect, and it is from the dialectic of a concrete theme treated in abstract compositions that my painting - which has progressively grasped what its true subject is - finds its logic and equilibrium.

      I consider myself as deeply implied in the logic of western aesthetics and believe that one of the fundamental functions of art it to find new solutions to plastic, aesthetic and technical problems; but for me, the form does not precede the subject. I define art as a praxis and make mine the thought of abstract expressionists according to whom painting must have an expressiveness equivalent to that of great music.

      Without having the vanity and pretension of having found a singular style and even without searching it, I try, via a language (abstract) discovered by others, to express philosophic preoccupations but also poetic  equivalences to my sensations and emotions before nature and cosmos, which preoccupations and equivalences are more complex than purely aesthetic and technical interrogations on form, structure, colour, composition or rhythm. When the subject is strong and experience sufficient enough, a personal style appears automatically. And after having searched for a long while, we search no more : we find. I find it trivial to say that I have found his own style.  I can't even force myself in the mimesis of my own style. Quoting Henry Miller, I would prefer to speak about language instead of style, this latter having been fully tarnished by fashion.

      Being a great lover of poetry and poet myself, I started entitling my paintings with a strophe, a distich or an entire poem: those of T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Thomas Dylan, Y.B. Yeats, Archibald Mac Leish, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Victor Segalen, Mac Diarmid and Kenneth White in particular, as well as my own poems or poem excerpts. Thus, painting and poetry start being intimately linked in this demarche. The reference to these poets in particular (especially American) ties my work to a tradition and sensibility which include man in Nature and cosmos as well as represent the human being in his effort to transfigure his existence and elevate himself towards the sublime.
What is useful is agreeable; what gives sense procures pleasure, and it is in this sense that I claim myself from what Etienne Souriau calls "l'art instaurateur", meaning an art which allows man to "lead a sublime life". This distich of Kenko:   
        Ocharacters drawn with my brush
        Be my guides to the Pure land.

A poetic claim
leading to the murmuring of rain

     Crossed by the silent river of meditation, my painting looks for simplicity, sobriety and moderation through form and colour. My painting hates facility, fantasy and gratuitous sophistication. There's nothing superfluous, nothing added in it. Although starting from an inner experience and from the patient observation of nature, it is not solely a sum of impression before a visible order and beauty. Its claim is also poetic. During the three last years, I have painted very simplified works, the first of which is a series of monochrome lozenges upon a monochromic or polychromic background. Other series figure out rectangles or polygonal forms some of them evoking Rothko's. Another series represents sorts of columns or "I" centred in the middle of the frame. Another series shows polygonal forms, neither stones nor objects, as if eroded by time but tenacious. In a series entitled "Rain", I once again abandoned synthesis for analysis : drops of rain exploding on the ground. In 2000, I dedicated most of my time to writing but in my free time I painted with Photoshop, Painter and Photo Paint and realized more than 300 digital works.

      In the abstract landscapes as well as in the lozenges series, in that of rectangles representing metaphorically the Trinity or in the other series reigns an dreamy atmosphere, indefinable, giving the feeling of abandonment away from the contingences of reality, in the silence of secret spaces. But this cannot be assimilated to an escape from the world realities but to a total integration and dissemination in the universe.

      So this extract from my journal (16-12-98): "I am always in search of the inner music that makes the essential strength in a piece of art. My painting is not comfortably laying on a cloud where from it would observe the world. I am not the master of the universe but an object of this world. An object which dissolves in each of the dimensions, an open eye every while, sometimes in the while, sometimes in the very eye that looks and smiles but without that demiurgic pretension, without the vanity of having the universe under control, simply as a grain of dust driven by the cosmic forces to places and spaces where other grains, because heavier, do not have the chance to go. One must become very small before nature to see how much immense and grandiose it is.

      I try to intercept "the essential rhythms of life", in order to use an expression of Jean Cocteau speaking about French painter, Helman. My painting aims at perpetuating the pleasure of painting of the impressionists, the spirit and sensibility of Vermeer de Delft, of Van Eyck…

      Then these abstract landscapes and cosmic forms can be read as a journal of the flux and reflux in my soul and mind. Eclecticism and nomadism are twins in my painting, with the purpose of grasping the various facets of a central theme : nature and culture. As I underlined it in my journal (22.11.98) :"My painting is nomad but with constant points which are the essential that resembles me the most and which are exclusively mine […]. Open is the centre of my painting like myself I think I am to the world."

      A generous painting never has the pretension to despise or discard a human heritage of many millenniums but that which tries to get enriched from it. There is something moving in the humility and modesty of the abstract expressionists whom I owe a lot. I consider that post-modernity is a mystification but what I cannot stand from those who utter that concept is denying that in art we all owe something to someone. My painting is in keeping with a very large poetic, literary and plastic tradition and sensibility (so my reference to American poets in particular) which has not died yet; and if it is abstract it is because abstraction has the best carried out this tradition and sensibility in the 20th century. It is abstract also because modernity is not dead, better it is still in its youth.

In 1991 I discovered the virtues of computer painting, then I forgot this tool immediately after. In year 2000, I had to finish a book on Algerian painting and did not have enough time for painting on the traditional media, so I started using the computer for artistic goals.Since then I have realized more than 600 digital works, which I first considered as sketches for works to be done with traditional media. Now I consider them as actual works of art, because they are those of a painter who has drawn a lot, who knows what colour, a well balanced composition, rhythm and harmony are, who has learnt a lot about the techniques of painting and drawing and who, above all, knows what his subject is. My digital paintings are not fractals! Because I didn’t come to art thanks to a computer but I, instead, have made a computer at the disposal of my art. Being a painter, it’s the computer which is a means for me, not the opposite. It’s nothing but a tool obeying my know how of an artist. I use artists packages, especially Painter, and I have never recourse to algorithmic operations which give advantageous effects and results to any amateur mastering the use of algorithms on a computer. Painter is a software package for artists; and if you don’t know what colour, harmony, composition and drawing are, it won’t help you get anything worth respect.

A computer helps me make a painting in a very short period of time, which is impossible to get with the traditional media, even with gouache or acrylics. The computer oil colours you use need no time to get dry! The water colours you use, too ! The quickness of realization offered by a computer is put on the service of the prolific and inspired artist I am.
Moreover, a software package offers a palette of 16 million colours, which palette never an artist can get in his studio, whatever large it can be. What digital art cannot offer me is texture, as what I love much in art is touching and smelling oil painting when it comes from a tube, smelling gouache, acrylics and China ink and feeling their paste or liquid in my hands, on my skin, my fingers… These feelings, never a computer will give.
      To close, I shall say that my painting is about the cosmic rhythm with its successive phases of birth, life, death, evolution and involution, dilatation and contraction, of permanent transformation. The order I am looking for is nearby that of vegetal and mineral structures we know and which blossom out into rhythms including the whole universe. Returned into murmuring, whispering and signs of the vast cosmos, where humility should be the law, certain elements seized by a brush would like to be fragments of a cosmic canto.
     "Now I progress out of images
     Let anybody follow me who dares!"
                    (Kenko, quoted by Kenneth White)

      Notes : The French into English translation of the whole text and excerpts from my journal is mine. The approximate translation of Rainer Maria Rilke (in Digital Paintings) and Bachelard's excerpts is also mine as well as that of Kenko's poems given in French by Kenneth White.