Djamel Tatah at the heart of the Dijon collections

Without losing any of their tranquility and gentleness, the anonymous figures painted by Djamel Tatah (born in 1959), over the last thirty years, today engage in dialogue with the two largest collections in the Burgundian capital. The encaustic prints and canvases of the Franco-Algerian artist invade the most intimate rooms of the former private mansion of collectors Maurice and Jeanne Magnin (brother and sister) and resonate with the sculptures and paintings that have adorned its walls for more than a century. Here, two pretty portraits of veiled women dating from 2020 are placed next to the terracotta sculpture Blessed Ludovica Albertoni according to Bernini; there, a lying on a red background from 2016 sits above The Wave by Auguste Préault (1856). The characters, sometimes centered, sometimes disoriented and truncated, occupy the museum even in its narrowest corridors and alcoves. Djamel Tatah does not neglect more imposing spaces: at the Museum of Fine Arts, his three elongated “blowers”, painted in 2024, appear alongside the recumbent figures in the Room of the Tombs of the Dukes of Burgundy. The artist also carried out work appropriating the collection of the municipal art museum. He extracted a few pieces from the reserves to constitute, at the heart of the temporary exhibition rooms, a constellation of images similar to the wall of references pinned up in his studio. From the sketches of Jean-François Millet to the graphic plates of Georges Rouault, including the Bambara mask and the altarpiece panel Emperor Augustus and the Sibyl of Tibur by Konrad Witz (ca. 1435), Tatah weaves improbable links between eras and styles, like the visual associations typical of the creative process.