Tahar Ben Jelloun: The color of words

Better known as a writer and poet, Tahar Ben Jelloun nonetheless has a long-standing relationship, not to say intimacy, with painting. There is, in fact, a correlation between Tahar Ben Jelloun's profession as a writer and his passion for painting. The man needs these two activities to find, no doubt, a kind of balance, even a vital recreation, for his novels, which often take up the dark side of man.

The canvases exhibited at L'Atelier 21, “painted in Morocco, under the sun of Marrakech, with its superb light, its pure air, have something different from those done under the gray skies of Paris”, as Tahar Ben Jelloun describes them, all exude a gentle enchantment and communicate a retinal joy. These canvases reflect the pleasure, the greedy happiness, that their author had in painting them. Around the edges of the canvases, the artist has inscribed phrases, often poetic fulgurances, that add to the pleasure of the eyes the intensity of the shock of words.