BÉCHIR BOUSSANDEL - THE SUN SETS IN THE EAST

Boussandel’s poetic space combines ornament, the diffusion of light and the miniature portrait. As places that are both empty and inhabited, lonesome protagonists scattered amongst the artists colourful and moving dunes echo each other in the vastness of the landscape. The psychedelic backgrounds emphasize this dream-like dimension, gradients of light coming from dawn or dusk and magnifying the often-contrasting shadows of the figures.

Within these paintings, the various objects are as small and defined as space is immense and uncertain. In the pseudo-topographical figurations, Boussandel denotes, as much as he fractures it, an apprehension of territory by those who inhabit it, discover it, exploit it. Stylized in miniature and accompanied by attributes that define them by their profession, these surveyors, gardeners, and delivery men all have to do with an idea of movement. Solitary on their moving plots of land, these few characters extracted from multiple environments are arranged and isolated on the canvases.

Each composition is a fragment of a much larger space offering a pictorial field halfway between visible and invisible, between abstraction and figuration. Within this fictional territory, the confrontation of the public and the private, the idle and the nomadic, is underlying. Appearances become deceptive in Boussandel’s paintings, giving the small an expansive and equal capacity to conquer the vast. No hierarchy orders those who occupy the place—neither foreground nor background—everything plays out in the margins. 

Text by Elora Weill-Engerer
Translated by Yohan Guibert