Abdelkader Guermaz

Abdelkader Guermaz (1919 - 1996) is a nonfigurative painter Algerian of the news Ecole of Paris, the elder one of the generation of the " fondateurs" modern Algerian art.

Biography

Guermaz is born on May 13rd, 1919 with Mascara (Algérie), but passes its childhood and its adolescence to Oran. It very early expresses artistic gifts and provisions: he will be painter, poet and critical of Article Of 1937 to 1940, he attends the School of the Art schools d' Oran, taking part as from 1941 in collective exposures to the gallery of avant-garde " Colline" of Robert Martin. He is writer with the newspaper Oran-Republican and realizes with Mostaganem in 1960 a personal exposure to the " Sésame" gallery; as well as a fresco for the General advice in 1961.

The same year, it arrives at Paris and is established there. Its work is presented there in 1962 and 1963 to the new gallery of Robert Martin, during collective exposures, but also during a personal exposure in 1963 to the " gallery Marie-Jacqueline Dumay". Throughout the Years 1960, it takes part in the Parisian Living rooms.

In Paris, Guermaz finds Algerian or European painters of Algeria who preceded it there. Come more tardily, it can from now on confront with them its ideals and its experiment of painting. Thus works of Guermaz côtoient those of Benanteur, Bouqueton and Khadda with the exposure Ten Painters of the the Maghreb to the " gallery Gouvernail" in 1963, and they are also present in 1966 at the exposure Six Painters of the Maghreb to the " gallery Painters of Monde".

Guermaz maintains the contact with Algeria. It becomes in 1962 corresponding to Paris of the newspaper the Republic of Oran . It is represented with the collective exposure Algerian Peintres which opens on November 1st, 1963 with the Museum of the Art schools of Algiers as to that which takes place under the same name, Algerian Peintres , with the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1964. This one joins together the large majority of the contemporary or European painters Algerian originating in Algeria. It is still present in Algiers with the Living rooms of the UNAP of 1964 and 1974, just as with the " Gallery 54" (Jean Sénac) in 1964, with the exposure Reflections and Promesses of the Gallery of the UNAP in 1966, finally with the exposure Contemporary Algerian Painting of the Palate of the Culture to Algiers in 1986.

To the whole beginning of the Years 1970, Guermaz continuous to affirm its presence in the Parisian Living rooms and are invited in 1971 to expose its works to the Orangery of Luxembourg in company of six young artists. Those from now on are presented permanently to the " Entremonde" gallery; in Paris from which it will receive a solid support during ten years. After a participation in a collective exposure in 1973, it will carry out there seven personal exposures of 1974 to 1981.

These demonstrations enable him to acquire an international reputation. It is invited to take part in the Salon of the Visual arts of Tokyo in 1972, with the International exhibition of Arts of Teheran in 1974, with the exposure Contemporary Arab Art of Tunis in 1980. It is present at London in 1981 and, the same year, it creates paperboards of Tapisserie for the airport of Riyadh.

The closing of the " Entremonde" gallery; in 1981 deprives it of the support and the visibility from which it could profit for a long time. From now on, Guermaz will undertake its research as a recluse and will continue, during fifteen years, to make evolve/move its work. Its notoriety remains intact near the French collectors and foreigners who can find the way of his workshop in Paris. He dies in Paris on August 9th, 1996.

Work

At its exit of the School of the Art schools d' Oran, Guermaz divides, in the Années 1940 and until the medium of the Années 1950, the design of his/her friends " Painters of Poetic Reality " whose Maurice Brianchon was the leader. During one time attached to the order, this design privileges the return to reality and the figuration, but a reality transfigured by poetry. The subjects of predilection of Guermaz are then scenes of outside, such as those of the beach in summer, the street, the brisk markets, of the flooded sun staircases, those of the villages to the crowned bleached walls of terraces, but he also excels in the indoor scenes and natures dead. It shown there already, as the critic notices it, a solid construction, of a harmonious balance of the colors, freshness and distinction.

As of the middle of the Fifties, Guermaz is directed towards the abstraction, like other Algerian painters of its generation, attentive with the evolution of Parisian painting. The abstraction is well, indeed, the only language which enables them to find their own roots. Combining tradition and modernity, this one has also a value of engagement in favor of freedom. Guermaz then becomes one of the actors of the movement abstracts Algerian.

The large abstract fresco that it carries out with Mostaganem in 1961 is the testimony of its new orientation which finds a prolongation in its first Parisian works. It moves away from the representation of the world for better being in its unison and better expressing, with the only resources of the plastic vocabulary, lines, forms, colors, its states of heart and the extent of the feelings and the emotions which it tests with its contact. In many of its abstract compositions, it inserts in a network of verticals and the horizontal ones, of which the black reinforces the structure, an infinity of spots of color. Heats like the red, the yellow and orange the, cold ones like blue, they give relief to space with two dimensions and create an atmosphere of great poetry.

At the end of the Years 1960, a new orientation is done day in the painting of Guermaz. If there remains faithful to the abstraction, he aspires from now on to a certain examination. In many of its works, the white replaces little by little the color which becomes almost subjacent with the pictorial layer. The treatment of the pictorial matter, all in vibrations, contributes entire to the development of the form. Its work takes a completely premonitory contemplative character then. Impregnated Occidental culture, Guermaz remained Eastern and, just like one observed it in many artists and Maghrebian writers, appears in him a predisposition to mysticism. Its creative capacity then takes its source in the meditation.

The first works of this period are uniformly white. But, a little later, from the coloured signs emerge from this original vacuum and come little by little to populate it. In fact unrelated spots of color, soon, are assembled in small units which contrast with the white zone. Virgin space is delimited and built, of the plans appear where take seat of the reliefs which open on the horizon of the sky.

These compositions became " paysages". Places of memory of not to doubt, or " places; mythiques" where is registered, in a deep past, its cultural identity, these landscapes are, more still, the testimony of the first steps which it takes on the way of wisdom and the proof of its spiritual engagement. They are of nature symbolic system.

Guermaz celebrates the unit of the matter and the spirit, but the spirit is well what he aspires to find in him. Little by little its " paysages" purify themselves and the coloured units are done rarer. A universe of rocks exposed is revealed and opened gradually towards the infinite one. This mineral universe, without limits, is well a metaphor of what one called the " desert intérieur". In its most interiorized works Years 1980, it still arrives to more an high degree of abstraction. Under the light veil of a white " cristallin" or of a bluish gray of some of its fabrics, it already seems to perceive space " cosmique".

One could not forget that Guermaz avoided translating in its work of other states of heart only serenity, on other subjects of inspiration and to have recourse in his oils, his Aquarelle S, his Pastel S, his Gravure S and his inks, with as many plastic vocabularies, of choice of forms, colors and matters that its taste of research and the pleasure of painting suggested to him. But its pictorial project merges well, essentially, with its spiritual step.

Some extracts of press

" If it were an attentive observer of the world, Guermaz gradually knew to be released from the weight of the things, to exceed the play of the forms, of appearances, to collect what is in the middle them things, to choose the spirit with the concrete one. But its works never for lost their savor as much of it, this veracity which makes the glance always accessory to the things with which it enters in “contact”. "

Jean-Jacques Lévèque, foreword of the exposure Six Painters of the Maghreb , " Gallery Painters of Monde" , Paris, 1966.

" Which meditation, which contemplative silence in works of Guermaz. Its new fabrics prove his interior advance to us, since paintings with the voluntary ardences which were an anthem with usual reality. Now, the artist seems to have taken altitude with his songs with sonorities blanches."

Dreamed Remy, s.l., about 1970.

" Poet, Guermaz, which appears since a quarter century, can be regarded as an initiate of the esotericism, and its painting in a double step does not describe only one rise towards serene loneliness (thus is called one of its large fabrics): it is itself this peaceful conquest of the cosmos."

Jean-Marie Dunoyer, Contemplations , in Le Monde , Paris, January 17th, 1976.

" The painters of the mystery require a paying entry in this mystery: keys, a well calculated design, obsessions, a scale of values. The painters of the obviousness, them, are satisfied to fold this obviousness with their temperament: it remains an obviousness or if one prefers, an element articulated perfectly apart from work. The exceptional one, at Guermaz, is that it reconciles mystery and obviousness: it makes the mystery familiar without having to tame it by the contrainte."

Alain Bosquet, the Mystery familiar of Guermaz , unfolding " Entremonde" gallery; , Paris, January 1977.

" De Guermaz, which occurs each year with the Entremonde gallery, one will retain with the first chief a vast fabric which is called Blanc of pleasure. With the extreme point of the examination, its quasi pearly monochromy recovers a scrupulous structure interns and manages to give one invading feeling of plenitude - state to which the constant moderation of Guermaz… " tightens besides;

Jean-Marie Dunoyer, the Old ones and modern the , in Le Monde , Paris, 20 January 21st, 1980.

" Painter of Transfinite (according to the expression of Verdiglione), Guermaz, with the serene virtuosity of a Master of the Zen (its very small fabrics are Mandala!) trace its paths of meditation on immense beaches of universe - Minutes of sand memorial… "

Roger Dadoun, Guermaz , in the literary Fortnight, n° 318, Paris, 1 February 15th, 1980.

" Exceeding appearances of which he refuses to be made the passive reflection, not being satisfied more narcissistic gesticulations, avoiding the traps of the disappointing pleasure that the only decorative harmonies get, it is in a spiritual experiment that its work proposes to enter. The new visions that Guermaz invents as as many halts with the length of its Voyage to the country of the light lead to the significant interrogation of reality even reality, engage in the most radical search of its irreducible There is . "

Michel-Georges Bernard, Guermaz, voyage to the country of the light , in Algeria Literature/Action , n° 49-50, Marsa Editions, Paris, March-April 2001 (p. 152).

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