Djabril Boukhenaïssi FR, b. 1993

A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Universität der Künste in Berlin, Djabril continues his artistic exploration through painting, pastel, and printmaking. His work is primarily inspired by literature and music and revolves around the concepts of disappearance and fragility. His paintings focus on reconstructing the evocative images he experiences, which, as they do for everyone, shape his relationship with the world. If the paintings he presents seem indecisive, as if halfway to a fully realized representation, it is because they seek to evoke events that are themselves evanescent, fragile, poorly defined, and poorly inscribed within our own inner selves. Events lodged in the interstices of our memory, which have settled and piled up there, and which slip away the moment we try to grasp them. Yet what has vanished leaves traces, insofar as they are what remains of our past, and the sand upon which we wish to build our present.

For the painter, painting is likely the realm where such recognition can be hoped for. Djabril posits that painting—crafted through porous, transparent motifs, themselves intersected by other motifs—is capable of evoking the way in which these fleeting, wavering inner images return to us through a duration that is uniquely our own. It is the porosity of pastel, once applied over the glazes of oil paint, that has enabled him to undertake such work.