Ali Fenjan: Stained-glass window, oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm

ALI

FE NJ AN

"The recent works of Fenjan take their strength from his desire to explore material and colour limitlessly. Everything merges: the memory of old walls of the East, the joyous teeming of colours of embroidered textiles, the world of objects embellished by time. This painter is one who inhabits light, who captures forms in movement

Tahar Bekri, writer and poet

Born in Iraq in 1945, Ali Fenjan was interested from a very early age in drawing and painting. With a Diploma in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts, Baghad, his reputation developed with a number of exhibitions in Arab countries. Arriving in France in 1973, he enrolled at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and obtained a second diploma, in gravure and lithography. Since then, he has participated in many exhibitions, one-man and group, going from a realist and academic period (until 1975), to an involvement with nee-Surrealism (1975-80), and then researching into techniques of gravure and lithography (1980-1987). Since 1987, he has devoted himself exclusively to painting.

"Fenjan has become a master in plastic art, creating harmony and contrasts, transparence and mystery. This sensitivity, very tied to the memory of his childhood and civilisation, as well as the modernity of the techniques he uses, allows him to crystalise the richness of relations between the cultures of east and west

"Not one of his works has a centre. His creative impulse continues ad infinitum, like notes of music or living bodies engaged in frenetic dance. The distinct elements which make up his paintings seem to give birth to one another, in an endless dynamic.

"By a play on perspective, where the spectator is an eagle flying over a landscape, each work represents traces or archeological remnants of ancient towns of the East."

Asaad Arabi, painter and critic