Lot Essay
This is the largest and most impressive of Abdallah Benanteur's paintings to have appeared in auction. Painted with an atonishing depth and with a broad range of colours, the semi-figural subject is highly unusual in his work.
"Benanteur's paintings have formal and sensitve beauty, with a strong visual impact, being neither figurative, insofar as the image could replace a photographic object, nor abstract, because they are always rooted within the elements of a deeply observed and felt nature... Lyrical landscapes, in which the imaginary struggle with deeply buried memories. A floating world, close to that of Chinese painting, in which top and bottom are interchangeable within a limitless space. But Benanteur never leaves any empty spaces, and his surface is worked over with coloured inflections, recalling earth's transparencies, or water's motions, or else that of scudding clouds, leading to liquid and amoshperhic fusion" Marc Herisse, translated by Ann Cremin Prologue in Claude Lemand (ed.), Benanteur, Vol. 1: Paintings, Paris, 2002, p.9.
"Benanteur's paintings have formal and sensitve beauty, with a strong visual impact, being neither figurative, insofar as the image could replace a photographic object, nor abstract, because they are always rooted within the elements of a deeply observed and felt nature... Lyrical landscapes, in which the imaginary struggle with deeply buried memories. A floating world, close to that of Chinese painting, in which top and bottom are interchangeable within a limitless space. But Benanteur never leaves any empty spaces, and his surface is worked over with coloured inflections, recalling earth's transparencies, or water's motions, or else that of scudding clouds, leading to liquid and amoshperhic fusion" Marc Herisse, translated by Ann Cremin Prologue in Claude Lemand (ed.), Benanteur, Vol. 1: Paintings, Paris, 2002, p.9.