Béchir Boussandel

Béchir Boussandel’s poetic space combines ornament, the diffusion of light and the miniature portrait. In his painting, the image of the world is babelized at pleasure. As places that are both empty and inhabited, the artist's colourful and moving sand dunes are scattered with lonesome protagonists who echo each other in the vastness of the landscape. Anachorites who never meet, solitary in their crossing of the desert on their moving plots of land, these few characters extracted from multiple environments are arranged and isolated on the canvass as in a nursery rhyme : the dog, the horse and the palm tree; the bag, the Bedouin and the stick. Because of their scale and the precision of their construction, they are, so to speak, the figurines of a board game posing serenely and called to be moved. Except that the game is free of any logic. At times an element repeats itself identically, like an anomaly reminding us of the unreality of these lands made of decoys. Physics is not the law either if we are to believe the polyfocal diagram in which geographical birds-eye views and small full-length portraits are combined. This onirogenic dimension is attested to by the psychedelic range of the backgrounds, gradations of light coming from dawn or dusk and magnifying the often contrasting shadows of the figures. The motionless, sometimes hieratic attitude of the latter is treated in a polished touch, and contrasts with the hypnotism of the clay backgrounds painted with large brushes in a physical relationship to the colour.