Djamel Tatah

Echoes of classic paintings and drawings and monochromes from the Collection Lambert

Corneille de Lyon, Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman…

December 3, 2017 – May 20, 2018

I try to make my painting experience a shared experience, one vision that meets another. Maybe this is the beauty of art: to succeed in doing something which is accessible to someone else.
Djamel Tatah

The Collection Lambert is organising an unprecedented exhibition in the form of a sensitive dialogue between the works of Djamel Tatah and those of artists from the museum and the Yvon Lambert Donation to the French State in 2012.
After studying at the Saint-Étienne School of Fine Arts, Djamel Tatah is now fully immersed in the pictorial experience. Since the 1980s, the painter has opted for large formats and polyptychs with monochrome backgrounds where actual-size human figures appear. These now share museum space with the spectator in a poetic and singular way.

As part of both the tradition of classical painting and that of monochrome painting inherited from minimalist art, all of Djamel Tatah’s recent works are presented at the Collection Lambert for the first time, interacting with ancient and contemporary works. The famous Cabinet des Dessins of the Beaux-Arts de Paris where Djamel Tatah has been teaching for nine years suggested a loan of around fifty works on paper, from Poussin to Géricault, from Delacroix to Carpeaux. Yvon Lambert has loaned some rare pieces, such as the Sleeping Ariane, presented alongside someone who is asleep, and drawings by Henri Matisse that form the perfect link with minimalist art. Works on paper and poetic paintings by Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Robert Barry and Richard Serra find a unique echo in a 15th century Italian Primitive on loan from the Musée du Petit-Palais, or with one of the rare paintings by Corneille de Lyon, a much sought-after portrait artist of the 16th century. All these ancient and contemporary works linked to the paintings of Djamel Tatah also echo today’s world and the tragedies of our history played out on the other side of the Mediterranean: Syrian refugees, migrants from Libya, Somalia and Yemen, the destruction of the ruins of Aleppo market or the Greco-Roman temples at Palmyra.

The artists

Djamel Tatah
Robert Barry, Vicente Carducho, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Sébastien Cornu, Michel François Dandré-Bardon, Corneille de Lyon, Henri de Triqueti, Eugène Delacroix, André Dutertre, Hippolyte Flandrin, Théodore Géricault, Alexandre Hesse, Jean-Antoine Julien, Eustache Le Sueur, Nicolas Lancret, Fernand Léger, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, Barnett Newman, Nicolas Poussin, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Abraham II Van Stry, Antoine Watteau

See the exhibition catalogue