Mahjoub Ben Bella : Lumière d’or

As much Algerian as he was French, Mahjoub Ben Bella went into exile in France in 1965, the year in which his illustrious uncle, Ahmed Ben Bella, the first President of free Algeria and a hero of the war of independence, was overthrown by a coup. This political filiation, which is barely discernible in Ben Bella's works, and which should not influence our vision of them, remains however fundamental to understand his trajectory, his geographical and historical identity - a certain uprooting. For there is nothing insignificant about having had to make a life for oneself in "metropolitan France" at a time at which one's native land had just been liberated from over a century of colonisation.

Ben Bella attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Oran, Algeria, before pursuing his training in French art schools, initially in Paris, before settling in northern France. In the early 1970s, he attended the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, which welcomed artists from Algeria, Lebanon, and Syria... Samta Benyahia, Nadia Saikali and Abdulkader Arnaout trained there at the same time as Ben Bella, who, amongst other innovations, produced studded paintings; a playful and provocative gesture, a desire to augment the work of art with urban and industrial "paraphernalia."[1]

Also in the 1970s, Ben Bella attended the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Barely a decade earlier, two important compatriots had also trained there: Denis Martinez and Choukri Mesli, who returned to Algiers after their Paris experience to form the Aouchem ("tattoo") group; the avant-garde of the Algerian école du signe with which Ben Bella maintained an almost subconscious dialogue.[2]

Although the Aouchem group's conception of the sign (prehistoric, Amazigh, African) was more anti-imperialist than Ben Bella's, less identitarian and more emancipated, both nonetheless reflected the shared conviction that "always magical, the sign is stronger than the bombs"[3] (an anti-militarist school of the sign, which Ben Bella later translated into a mural in tribute to Nelson Mandela and other freedom fighters). This magical conception of the sign, which reveals neither its sources nor its origins, set Ben Bella apart from many neo-calligraphers who were literally rooted in the Arabic script (Hassan Massoudy, Hossein Zenderoudi...). Ben Bella, for his part, made a singular shift from simple graphics to hyper graphics,[4] a tendency to saturate the pictorial space, freeing the signifier from the signified, the writing gesture from the constraint of language, the arabesque from an ornamental grammar. From this point of view, he was closer to the letterists Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître, or to the Automatic Drawings (produced under the influence of mescaline) of Henri Michaux, than to his Iraqi or Iranian counterparts.[5]

The magical conception of the sign - transcending the calligraphic tradition - takes the symptomatic form of graphomania. It's as if the artist's body, seized by an irrepressible urge to write, were transformed into a writing machine; a de-subjectivising, deviant machine that transgresses the frontier of the "beautiful writing" (calligraphy), moves towards drawn writing, and finally towards emancipated (or even exploded) writing.

Ben Bella gives us further clues through the notion of "talisman," to which several of his works explicitly refer. In both the Sufi and the Islamic traditions, the talisman is a ritual and magical practice, but also a hyper graphic one. Using an invisible grid, it condenses an alchemical swirl of numbers, letters, and signs, with no beginning or end.

Ben Bella's talisman-works are endowed with ubiquity, insofar as they transport the sign beyond the limits of the painting (you lose your bearings up, down, left, and right). They form divinatory systems or ink mirrors (very widespread in Algeria): the art of prediction consisting in pouring ink or oil into the palm of the hand. In this way, Ben Bella gives us (or not) his secret formula, that of the hidden symmetry between the lines of the hand, the lines of life, the lines of time.

Translated from the French by Juliet Powys