BENANTEUR - A PASSION TO SHARE. PAINTINGS, 1955-2011.
Claude Lemand.
Born in 1931 in Mostaghanem, Abdallah Benanteur was brought up in an Algerian family and cultural environment, specifically enthralled by writing and illuminated manuscripts, by mystic Muslim poetry, by Andalusian music and songs. In 1953, he settled down in Paris, which he transformed into his own capital of life, creation and international outreach. He was influenced by the great masters of the museums in France and Europe, yet he managed to create his own personal œuvre, producing lyrical landscapes infused with the light of his Mediterranean homeland and that of his adopted Brittany, as well as landscapes that are sometimes abstract or dotted with silhouettes of people walking.
His work is the reflection of an idealist, humanist, and universalist vision, born of two conceptions of the world that influenced him successively, and whose categories informed him powerfully, for they correspond to his human, aesthetic and social ideal : the Sufi movement he knew as a child and as an adolescent in Algeria (poems, songs, processions, calligraphy and illuminated books) and the utopian communist movement that influenced him in the fifties in France, both of them close to that Far Eastern Buddhism, whose poets and painters he knows and admires so much (wisdom, poetry and painting : ideal landscapes and man’s modest and harmonious place within nature). Benanteur would have liked to live and work in a country and during a time where that human, aesthetic and social ideal still endured : e.g. the late Middle Ages in Europe or the pinnacle of Arab-Andalusian civilization.
Translated from French by Ann Cremin.
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Literature. Two Books are available:
BENANTEUR, Monograph Volume 1. Paintings.
BENANTEUR, Monograph Volume 2. Graphic Works
