NAJAH ALBUKAI / ALIREZA SHOJAIAN "OMBRES D'HOMMES
CARTE BLANCHE TO MURIEL MAYETTE-HOLTZ CURRENT DIRECTOR OF THE THÉÂTRE NATIONAL DE NICE, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE VILLA MÉDICIS IN ROME.

Shadows of men,
At the end of the hand, of a pen or a pencil,
At the end of a knife, a desire or a suffering,
At the end of their memory, their journey and their experience,
By little bits of body,
By small strokes of pencils,
Two artists draw the man
The one they knew, the one they lost
in the shadow of memory and nightmare, in the light of their expectations,
They search in their painful history the trace of those they left behind.
They draw relentlessly almost the same subject always,
A man, men, the man.

One Najah Albukai is an artist survivor who left his cellmates in the hell of Syrian prisons. Through his work, he testifies relentlessly to give a body to the forgotten numbers of human flesh in the Middle East.

Little by little, he succeeds in offering a little color to the charcoal bodies that blacken his notebooks for so long. He paints in order not to cry, to extract the memories from his memory, to pay them a final tribute and give them a face...
But it is undoubtedly him that he draws through these thin bodies with torpid and supplicating faces...
He paints to denounce, to accuse the violence of this inhuman war with the blood of a black ink. His disarming smile does not let us see any of his suffering; only his paintings pierce our hearts.

The other Alireza Shojaian is Iranian, he was chased away for his loving tendencies. He paints the man too much in truth, too much in detail as if to offer us what is not said, a trembling from under the skin. On a flesh-colored support, he scrutinizes each pore, each hair and the blood always ends up surfacing. The drawing is pure, disturbing, of a theatrical realism, almost embarrassing.

These bodies, naked, angular, bearded, hairy, these offered bodies seem each time a little his. He, the foreign child who knows everything about the male.

What unites them,
Without doubt a child's smile rescued from the darkness
A sharp and piercing line
The obsession of this brother man
Two singular universes that life has brought together by chance
What unites them lies in the Middle East in the struggle of an oppressed freedom
What unites them is an almost imperceptible veil in the eyes of their subjects.
A shadow on the man.
Muriel Mariette-Holtz Director of the Theatre of Nice