Galerie Claude Lemand

Lydia Harambourg.
Abdallah Benanteur’s blazing land­scapes are rooted in a two-folded anchoring. The great Algerian painter, born in Mostaganem in 1931, arrived in Paris in 1953. Following the Arab-Islamic tra­di­tion, his cul­ture fuses non-fig­u­ra­tive art with a per­sonal lyri­cism, which reflects the beauty of a lost nature that has been found again. The nos­talgia of the deserts’ and the Mediterranean’s far away hori­zons is trans­posed into Brittany’s vast seascapes. With hon­ey­combed touches of paint, he recre­ates the shifting beauty of the spec­trum of the sun, which trans­form the land­scape, unset­tled like its imag­i­nary world. His painting is poly­mor­phous as it is pen­e­trated by scan­sions, formal ele­ments har­mo­niously put together and painted with a care­fully mas­tered freedom. His accom­plished skills as a painter bear wit­ness of his famil­iarity of the great mas­ters, which he had seen at the Louvre and in Italy.
There are no empty spaces in his vibrant paint­ings bursting with translu­cent and opaque colours, making way for the light of the sun or of the twi­light to pierce through the canvas. His painting is uni­versal and reveals itself as a broad touch with sym­phonic accents, that cel­e­brate the great orig­inal forces, hinted by iri­des­cent, mar­bled, aerial tex­tures in unison with the sky, clouds, oceaand wide cosmic areas enshrouded with trans­paren­cies. Nor high, nei­ther low, sim­ilar to Chinese painting, in his visual poems with its lyrical arbores­cence con­stantly expanding. His paint­ings are exe­cuted with a move­ment rem­i­nis­cent of cal­lig­raphy cher­ished by a fine glazing. They are metaphor­ical, sym­bol­ical. They are an ode to life. (Lydia Harambourg, La Gazette Drouot, 4 October 2013).

Translated from French by Valérie Hess.

Available Publications:

BENANTEUR, Paintings. Volume 1 of the Monograph, pre­pared and pub­lished by Claude Lemand, 224 pages in colour, 25 x 33 cm. Hard cover and box in colour. Texts in French and in English. Paris, 2002. ISBN 2-910263-00-2.

BENANTEUR, Graphic Works. Volume 2 of the Monograph, pre­pared and pub­lished by Claude Lemand, 288 pages in colour, 25 x 33 cm. Hard cover and box in colour. Texts in French and in English. Paris, 2005. ISBN 2-910263-02-9.