The chiaroscuro of the painter Abdelhak Benallou in full light in Paris

Abdelhak Benallou is a painter like no other. Or rather that we see timidly reemerging from the rubble of conceptual art, in love with the great masters who populated our museums with their trompe-l’oeil art. Like his friend and compatriot Bilal Hamdad, 39, who has just exhibited in the Petit Palais collections, or like the other Franco-Algerian, Dhewadi Hadjab, 34, revealed by the artist incubator Poush and brought to the top of the market by the Mennour gallery, Abdelhak Benallou admires the Ancients. And settles peacefully outside the world and fashions to invent its immobile universe under the blue light of the screens.

From Van Eyck to Ingres, from Velázquez to Rembrandt, his references are classic. Another talent passed through the Poush workshops in Aubervilliers, it was exhibited in the Lambert Collection in Avignon and it is already in the collection of business manager and patron Laurent Dumas, whose art center opens this fall on Seguin Island. The artist was also selected among the 12 young talents for his Emerige 2023 prize. The Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, with its white walls and industrial architecture so Parisian, was the first that he visited and loved upon his arrival in the capital, as an observer who is not easily influenced and as a new soul. His first real exhibition will therefore be held in an address that made him dream.

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Humility and confidence

Born in 1992 in Chlef in Algeria, Abdelhak Benallou is a calm young man who goes from the innate reserve of the son of a good family to the passion of the bubbling artist who has finally found his horizon. This old-fashioned talent, which was forged by five years at the Beaux-Arts of Algiers, left in 2017 for the north of France and the Beaux-Arts of Dunkirk where he suffered, he says, because painting was not popular, but from where he graduated in 2019. With this particular mix of humility and assurance which testify to a vocation, he fought for a long time before arriving at this point of balance which marks the emergence of recognition. He was noticed on the Instagram account of the Beaux-Arts de Paris (atelier Stéphane Calais), where he continued his training, for his art of trompe l’oeil and his work on drapes by the Georgian prodigy Demna Gvasalia, then artistic director of Balenciaga.

He painted Demna’s models on t-shirts, including the artist and androgynous muse Eliza Douglas, which became so many unique pieces (sold for €35,000, including €7,000 for the painter, ” the price of a small painting by an artist who arrives »). « I’ve barely seen Demna, he’s not pretentious, he’s shy, almost uncomfortable, barely looks you in the eye. I did two collaborations with him. For the first, his team sent me a blank fabric and a pattern cut in the shape of jeans, I painted jeans on it from a dark blue background, they then assembled it to create a fake trompe l’oeil jean, Abdelhak Benallou tells us. And I’m not sorry not to have been associated with Balenciaga at the time of the controversy over the campaign for the spring-summer 2023 collection, mixing children and accessories with sexual connotations. »

We feel a natural respect for limits and decorum, a certain morality, a term often forgotten in the world of contemporary art, in this exile who grew up under the influence of orientalism and Étienne Dinet. He has since become a French citizen, newly married in the country from which he has just returned with his wife, an architect, who is discovering the gray skies of Paris. “ I learned nothing technically as a painter at the Beaux-Arts, apart from the theory or reproduction of Women of Algiers of Delacroix . Rather, it is the collaboration and solidarity between artists that has been beneficial. Choosing your colors, knowing how to mix them to obtain the right tone that you are looking for, it’s in our genes. We are artists or not. I started painting when I was 14, and it was something I seemed to have known forever. I paint in oil, I don’t like acrylic, we don’t get the same result, we can’t do glazing, beautiful gradients. I started with gouache, oil paint was too expensive. Another student, a girl, had a box of Pébéo oil colors, brought from France by her uncle. Entry level. She sold them to me at half price – maybe 20 euros, it was a lot of money for me, my father helped me – in exchange for fulfilling her duty. She turned 17, I got my colors. »

The invisible thread of realism

Looking at the paintings, and no longer at the photos of the paintings, was his essential lesson. “ Copying from the original is the way to understand the painting, to see how the light works, why the layer of paint is thick here, why there is a glaze there. In Chlef, I didn’t have a museum to learn from. In Algiers, things were already much better. And then France, the Louvre for Rembrandt and the Orsay Museum which I love, for Birth of Venus (1879) and the narrative force of William Bouguereau, master of the flesh, who dares to mix purple and green. Bilal Hamdad, Dhewadi Hadjab and I are often asked why Algeria loves painting so much. It’s true that realism connects us like an invisible thread. Perhaps because we lacked painting, museums, models. This lack determined us », recognizes this admirer of Ingres, who pays homage to him in his painting Backlight (2025). « I only paint with artificial light, I try to work with chiaroscuro in today’s light, that is to say neither natural light nor candlelight. I am interested in the connection between the virtual and the real, this new ability that changes all societies. When I return to Algeria, even my mother is hooked on her phone! »

“Abdelhak Benallou. Red, Green, Blue”, Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, 21, rue Chapon, Paris 3rd, from March 19 to May 2.