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Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

—T.S. Eliot

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“Solitary Figures” is a long overdue debut—the first solo exhibition in the United States by Djamel Tatah, a French painter of Algerian heritage, who has shown extensively in Europe for four decades. The critical respect that Tatah has consistently garnered abroad is due in no small measure to the fact that his works—featuring pale, self-contained, plainly garbed figures against monochrome backgrounds—comport perfectly with a major strain of postwar European thought and sensibility. To immerse one’s self in Tatah’s compositions is to feel the world of Beckett and Sartre, Giacometti and Antonioni. The works remind us of a time when artists and critics spoke without embarrassment of “the human condition.” Yet, for all their overtones of universality, these stark, emotionally fraught pictures also bear a few cultural signifiers (the robe and headscarf worn by a seated woman, the migrant-style tracksuits of several young men) that specifically evoke Mediterranean postcolonialism.

 

When Tatah began his career—studying at the École des beaux-arts de Saint-Étienne, beginning to exhibit his minimalistic scenarios to ever mounting critical appreciation—he was in a kind of legal and psychological limbo. The artist was born in France, in 1959, to Berber parents who had immigrated from the Kabylia region of Algeria, then still a restive French colony. Under French law, these “aliens,” part of a massive (and still ongoing) population shift from North Africa and the Middle East to the southern shores of Europe, could reside in France as “nationals” but not as full citizens. Their son, however, was eligible for native-born status—provided that he register with the state bureaucracy at the age of sixteen. This the youth inadvertently failed to do. Consequently, Tatah became, in effect, a stranger in France, unable to vote in or engage fully with the official body politic of his homeland. The artist remained in this situation until he was officially decreed a citizen of France in 1992, at the age of 33.

 

It is likely no coincidence, then, that Tatah’s characters embody a psychic state of suspension. They rise before us much like the souls in Dante’s first circle of Hell—spirits neither punished nor blessed but defined by their inability to attain grace and enter into Paradise. While Tatah’s personages share that spiritual homelessness, they also emerge, as do the Italian poet’s, from a particular sociopolitical milieu. Thus they are always double. They can be seen, in one aspect, as walking (or standing, falling, or lying) poeticism—living metaphors for metaphysical displacement—yet they also simultaneously evoke very concrete real-world inequities. Perhaps that is why these perpetual exiles appear mildly stunned, their sensitivity shocked into numbness. In one painting, for example, a matronly woman stares impassively into the distance over a male body lying at her feet. She may be a timeless emblem for maternal grief, but her origins lie in a specific circumstance. Indeed, Tatah often derives his figures from news photos or family snapshots. Others echo historical works of art, their poses duplicated by relatives, friends, or models.

 

Likewise, the figures’ starkly white skin tone, made pasty and almost tactile by the admixture of wax with the artist’s pigments, might signal their indeterminate status between being and non-being. Or, more sardonically, their paleness may parody the cultural “whiteness” required to fully participate in the Western society of Tatah’s birth.

 

So how, given such distinctly foreign determinants, can these nearly life-size paintings connect—and connect so poignantly—with viewers in the United States? The answer lies, I think, in two factors: space and selfhood.

 

By any measure, whether physical or conceptual, Tatah’s pictures are largely devoted to emptiness. Although he has not formally studied ink painting, the artist clearly shares with traditional East Asian masters a deep understanding of the power of the unstated, the unseen, the implicit. The space between Tatah’s figures is filled not with depicted objects or expressive brushstrokes but with one or two blocky, single-color planes that serve, like the broad areas of untouched surface in literati paintings, as blank well-springs for viewer imaginings. Tatah’s emptiness, however, is not associated—in the classic Asian manner—with long cyclical duration and an abiding peace of mind, but instead bespeaks a pervasive anxiety of unknowing. The thoughts that his pictures elicit echo Gauguin’s probing 1898 questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? One’s responses to these existential queries are subtly shaped, made at once timely and timeless, by Tatah’s semiotic artistry: a colonial detail of attire, a disconsolate facial expression, an arrested movement, a meeting of figures who do not truly meet.

 

Tatah’s monochrome backdrops cast the traditional figure-ground relationship in its most fundamental terms. The depicted individuals seem to emerge from a primordial void—almost as if spoken into existence by the divine logos of Genesis—and then maintain their presence calmly but tentatively, in full knowledge that the abyss will ultimately subsume them again. One scans their postures and faces in vain for any hint of defiance, or wild joy, or hatred, or hope. Each figure seems, rather, to have internalize the biblical admonition “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” In some cases, the vertical or horizontal blocks, like stylized architectural elements, separate or partially entrap the human characters. Even when Tatah’s figures embrace—for instance, the man and woman in a work from 2021—their act suggests the coupling of two solitudes. Surely all this is at the farthest possible remove from American expansiveness, abundance, vitality, and individualism.

 

And yet....

 

Tatah’s isolate men and women—for the artist paints nothing else (no animals or plants, no clouds or cityscapes, no mountains or rivers, no tabletop miscellany of everyday items)—remind us that there is a paradox at the heart of the American experience. This land of visual sweep and natural bounty, which for four centuries has hosted a culture of myriad immigrant communities, has nevertheless in its recent art—since the advent of Modernism—largely favored pictorial flatness and the personification of its national ethos in the figure of the loner.

 

The conundrum begins with a morphing of pictorial space. In the 19th century, the Hudson River School and the Luminist painters associated the pure light and vast vistas of the American landscape with divinity, a benign and pervasive spiritual presence. But soon, in the works of artists like John Gast and Frederic Remington, the Divine became willful: the prairies, deserts, and mountain ranges of the West were taken as signs of a Manifest Destiny, God’s desire for the stupendous continental expanse to be populated and developed—specifically by mountain men, cowboys, ranchers, and covered-wagon settlers.

 

Perhaps in reaction to that vision’s cruel myopia (were indigenous peoples not already there?), as well as to the nation’s increasing secularization, many 20th-century American artists—Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, the Abstract Expressionists, Agnes Martin—opted for a depersonalized sense of grandeur. Their paintings convey cosmic wonder, but not a cosmic personality. In the process, painterly space—though still expansive, still tinged with the Sublime—grew flatter. In Color Field painting, in works by Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Frank Stella, and the Minimalists, the picture plane moves forward, meeting the viewer face-on. By the 1960s, we confront the billboard effect of Pop art. It is here, where space has become a wall, that Tatah’s figures enter the scene—or find them-selves superimposed upon it.

 

This spatial evolution—which can be traced, over a longer period, in the European tradition as well as the American—was cyclical: from flatness to depth to flatness again. The figures in Egyptian wall paintings, in Greco-Roman mosaics and murals, in Gothic altarpieces and frescoes were often placed against a blankness that was, conceptually, full of significance: its infinitude betokened the soul’s eternal life. Only for an interlude of five centuries, from the Renaissance to Realism, was deep space (as opposed to flat spaciousness) routinely conjured up by linear perspective, atmospheric coloration, chiaroscuro, sfumato, and light-source modeling—all devices for positioning subjects precisely in the world, where their identity could be further refined by attire, adornment (or lack there-of), and social accoutrements (from royal scepter to shepherd’s crook, from lordly coach-and-six to miner’s lamp). But perhaps due to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on precisely these empirical and typological concerns, deep space died with God—in 1882, by Nietzsche’s account—prompting the Modernist reversion to flatness. Now, on a neutral pictorial field, the components of a scene can be laid out objectively, legibly, without compositional hierarchy or obfuscation. Thus the long historic arc for the figure in Western painting is from symbol to representation to sign.

 

But what are we to make of Tatah’s sign-like figures, his silent arrivals, in an American context? Truth be told, they are probably more recognizable here, more disturbingly relevant, than we care to admit. The United States is the land of immigrants par excellence, rife with all the same issues that lie behind Tatah’s travelers: departure from homelands racked by destitution or conflict, uncertainty regarding one’s place in a New World, unrelenting competition for a livelihood and social acceptance. Little wonder that this resettlement is usually undertaken in groups: families that emigrate together, groups from the same “old country” village or neighborhood, religious sects, bands of like-minded farmers and workers. First-generation immigrants tend to live in ethnic enclaves, to practice mutual assistance, and to rely heavily on relatives and friends. This can be seen as clearly in Montpellier, Marseille, and other cities of Tatah’s home region—the South of France, where the glamour of the international leisure set contrasts glaringly with the daily struggles of unemployed former colonials and the French working class—as it can in the checkerboard ethnic demographics of New York City or the distribution of Hispanic migrants, legal and illegal, throughout the U.S.’s southern borderlands.

 

America’s entire westward expansion aimed for the establishment of “civilization,” translated in mundane terms as tranquil farms, villages, and towns where people could gather to exchange goods and exercise democratic rights. Yet psychologically—and this is the second aspect of the dual American paradox—each migrant’s adaptation feels singular: an alteration in selfhood that is private and particular to each struggling person. During the assimilation process, one’s being transforms in inner solitude, regardless of external circumstance.

 

Perhaps this is why the U.S. “melting pot” has produced, counter-intuitively, a mythos of heroic individualism. The frontier was a place where that new internal aloneness could go—could “light out for the territory,” as Huck Finn put it. Even as America’s famed “wide open spaces” have diminished and the country has ferociously urbanized, that old laconic outrider dream has not entirely died. A certain lone cultural hero persists. The gunslinger became the private eye became the avant-garde artist: a rueful watcher who stands apart from and corrects society, a maverick who, at moments of crisis, steps in to save the good townspeople but never becomes—and never wants to become—truly one of them. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence claimed. “It has never yet melted.”

 

In art, cross-cultural resonances echo and re-echo. The most famous novel by Algeria’s most famous writer, Albert Camus, is aptly titled L’Étranger (“The Stranger” or “The Outsider”). It features a profoundly detached protagonist who commits an apparently meaningless and unmotivated murder—a title and a narrative premise completely consonant with both Wild West and noir detective fiction by American writers like Louis L’Amour (author of such frontier tales as The Empty Land and Lonely Men) and Dashiell Hammett (who created the quintessential private investigator Sam Spade, a man named after a playing card, immortalized onscreen by Humphrey Bogart). Camus himself, in discussing his early influences, gave a critical nod to the hardboiled crime novelist James M. Cain. Meanwhile, as a pied noir (a Frenchman born in Algeria) Camus was, psychically, the mirror image of Tatah (an Algerian born in France). And one of Tatah’s most frequently cited early works is a self-portrait of the young artist standing next to a commemorative marker for Camus.

 

Ironically, that stele in Algeria bears a quote in which the writer avers his “right to love without limits.” Standing apart not only to critique but also to love—even to make criticism an expression of love—is very much the spirit of Tatah’s work. Call it oblique communalism. Some artists immerse themselves in the muck, glitter, and turmoil of their social era; others analyze their milieu from afar. In his landmark painting series “The Migration of the Negro” (1940-41), Jacob Lawrence both visually portrayed and verbally described, in concrete detail, the successive stages of the early 20th-century Black odyssey from the rural South to the urban North. But Tatah, like many artists who came of age under the aesthetic reign of late Euro-American Modernism, tends to eschew explicit narrative, instead exposing social inequities by visual implication.

 

In this, he has numerous American confreres—most notably Edward Hopper and Alex Katz. Hopper, the artistic prophet of the mid-20th-century “lonely crowd,” made ennui palpable. His lost souls—stymied somewhere in the middle range of society—inhabit theaters, offices, restaurants, apartments, and Victorian houses that feel every bit as empty as Tatah’s vacuous hard-edge backgrounds. Katz, in contrast, presents consumer society’s moderate winners, individuals comfortably positioned (both in the pictorial field and in life)—sophisticated, affluent, attractive—playing their parts against a monochrome void that is never, even when candy-sweet in color, entirely without tempus fugit sobriety.

 

A literalist might view Tatah’s figures as simply dispossessed, in tune with America’s current cult of victimhood. Although the immigration story often ends well in this country, there is no denying that it rebegins, generation after generation, with multiple waves of immigrants—Irish, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, etc.—finding themselves disoriented and often disdained upon arrival, wrenched from their rooted past and stranded here with no-where else to go. Thereafter, they must contend with a business system increasingly rigged to favor the already wealthy. And this is to say nothing of African Americans, whose ancestors were brought to these shores forcibly, and who still contend with a centuries-long legacy of exploitation and bias. (Tatah is deep admirer of Black American music, especially Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On, replete with the social protest of the 1960s).

 

But Tatah’s characters are not modeled for verisimilitude or neatly tagged for quick social processing. Nor are they elevated (or elevating) amid celestial gold or azure. It is too late in the world’s story for that. Appearing at this postmodern moment, they are better understood as fully evolved anti-icons. Placed among us in this everyday moment, mute but solicitous in their common humanity—in our common humanity—they exist in an absolute here-and-now, the only place justice can ever be done.

 

On one level, Tatah’s figures could be escaping (if not already fallen to) lethal conflicts in North Africa or crossing the U.S.-Mexico border as they flee chaos in the Global South. They could also be entering an unknown ontological dimension, the realm of perpetually unsettled souls. Or both. After all, we are all displaced persons, given that this earth, the only home we have ever known, is utterly indifferent to our existence. We live and move and have our being as temporary residents—never permanent citizens—of the physical cosmos, of the land of the living.

 

From the exhibition catalogue Djamel Tatah: Solitary Figures, New York, Bienvenu, Steinberg & J., 2023.

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