Djabril Boukhenaïssi

Graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2018, Djabril Boukhenaïssi expresses his sensitivity through painting and engraving. At the beginning of his career, he wandered through the halls of the Louvre Museum to exercise his eyes as much as his hand and thus impregnated his practice with influences from the 19th and 20th centuries.

The techniques he adopts are the result of long and meticulous research, which he never dissociates from his artistic and philosophical reflections. The medium must resonate with the subject matter: etching and aquatint come together, as do oil and pastel.

Through his readings, Djabril Boukhenaïssi questions our relationship to memory and time. Among his references is Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, published in 1931: the work illustrates the two divergent theses on temporality, respectively defended by Bergson and Bachelard. How to apprehend the passing of time, when the notions of duration and continuity oppose the concept of the instant? What place do our memories retain? How do the constellations of images that populate our memories evolve?

In 2023, Private Choice presents a series of works around the theme of loss and disappearance. As if to materialize the memories that escape him as he tries to hold onto them, the artist alternates between oil paint washes erased with turpentine and veils of pastel, thus playing with the porosity and fragility of this medium. The characters are solitary, their mental image shifting, sequenced, sometimes fantasized.

In his work Childhood, the artist brings to life on the canvas the reminiscences of his youth, illustrating the house he lived in as a child. Standing in a silent landscape, the building displays its proportions of yesteryear, yet overturned in adulthood.