TATAH - MATISSE EXHIBITION . UNTITLED"

MARCH 16 - MAY 27, 2024

The painter Djamel Tatah (born in 1959 in Saint-Chamond) offers a renewed tour of the entire Matisse Museum in Nice. He has subjectively selected from the museum's collections a hundred graphic works and sculptures by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), belonging to the latter's entire career, augmented by exceptional loans from the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA). He alternates them with some thirty of his own paintings, generally monumental in format, chosen from his production over the last twenty years and belonging to public as well as private collections.

It is not the colourist Matisse that Djamel Tatah has chosen to favour but the master of black and white, the artist of line and line, working obsessively on the same motifs, tirelessly studying gestures and their variations, notably in the studies drawn for La Danse commissioned by Albert Barnes (1930-1933) and for the chapel of Notre-Dame du Rosaire in Vence (1948-1953). in the sculpted seated heads and women, but also in the series of lithographs from 1913 and etchings from 1929, of which loans from the INHA will provide a very rare overview. From one room to another, with sometimes, though infrequently, direct confrontations, these works by Matisse dialogue in a game of consonances and dissonances with those of Djamel Tatah, based on the presence on a real scale of human figures, solitary or multiple, performing precise choreographies on backgrounds treated in solid colours.
At the heart of the museum, a section is devoted to what Djamel Tatah calls a "cabinet of common curiosities". He has placed here some of the objects with which Matisse surrounded himself throughout his life, often from the Muslim world, mixed here with some significant objects from his own journey, from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other.

Police station

Éric de Chassey, Director General of the Institut national d'histoire de l'art