Djamel Oulkadi

If he was born in the movement of graffiti, Djamel Oulkadi does not resemble any of his representatives. His work is related as much to Arab-Muslim abstraction which tries to avoid the image and human representation as to certain works of Op Art where the eye is solicited in the displacement of spaces that it tries to to stare. His works on canvas like his frescoes are made of paths, paths, furrows, vessels, alleys that take us on a vertiginous journey in mazes and labyrinths that he seems to discover himself as he goes. his race. Because there is rhythm in this work, setbacks, stops, accidents and silences. Music that would be transcribed not in notes but in colors and in a succession of flat surfaces and tortuous lines. A painting that can be read in snatches, one detail after another but also - and this is where it wins our support even more - as a whole when the interlacings, the encasements, the surfaces accumulate like an ordered patchwork and burst, free and constrained to form only one immense canvas interrupted here to better take it up further on. Sanguine, strong and colorful works that are contradicted by canvases, in black and white or in multiple shades of gray, singularly aerial, cold and icy. A way for the painter to talk to us about death and life especially when an image, often a figure, penetrates as if by breaking into the body of the canvas. The fascinating thing about this approach lies in the "everything is possible" of this singular artist who makes him a true researcher.