Biography
Abdallah Benanteur grew up in the western Algerian port city of Mostaganem, where his uncle, a musician, introduced him to Andalusian music and his father taught him about poetry and mysticism. Benanteur's father was involved in anti-colonial politics and was one of the first Algerians to be interned by the French in the Hoggar Mountains, in the extreme south of the country. Benanteur remembers making his first paintings at ten or 12 years of age, painting flowers on handkerchiefs. Reflecting on his early start as an artist in a 1998 interview with Djilali Kadid, Benanteur attributes his ability to paint despite his poor health as a child to his parents' support, and explains that, because he was a shy child, painting offered him a way to get closer to others indirectly.
Benanteur studied painting, sculpture, and drawing at the Institute of Fine Arts in Oran before joining the French army. In 1953, he moved to Paris with his friend and fellow painter, Mohammad Khadda (1930–1991). Algerian author Rachid Boudjedra has described Benanteur's decision to remain in Paris in a voluntary state of exile, one that is simultaneously metaphysical and geographic. Benanteur is associated with the post-World War II New School of Paris, alongside other Algerian-born painters such as Mohamed Aksouh (1934), Jean de Maisonseul (1912–1999), Maria Manton (1910–2003), and Louis Nallard (1918), as well as with what Jean Sénac (1926–1973) called the École des signes (School of Signs), with Abdelkader Guermaz (1919–1996) and Khadda. François Pouillon argues that these artists resisted figuration and embraced abstraction, in part, in response to the dominance of nationalist themes in figurative painting in Algeria at the time of the country's independence in 1962.
Benanteur's oeuvre can be divided into two categories: paintings and artists' books. Largely non-figurative, Benanteur's paintings oscillate between landscape and abstraction. They are characterised by short, dynamic, and loose brushstrokes, a vivid use of colour, and the incorporation of predominantly Algerian symbols and nature. The colour blue dominates Benanteur's paintings from the 1950s, while ochre characterises many of his paintings in the 1960s. His Visiteuses (Visitors) series began in 1975 after Benanteur visited his mother in Algeria. Benanteur's wife, the poet Monica Boucher, describes the Visiteuses as "forms at the limit of the figurative and the abstract," and notes that in each, the same mother-woman figure appears. This series includes the 200 gouaches that Benanteur produced in a single month following his visit to Algeria and the 24 large paintings he completed over the subsequent two years. In the late 1970s, he began painting diptychs and triptychs, a choice of format motivated in part by the artist's admiration for painters like Grunewald and Giotto, but which also enables the artist to physically include the spectator in the painting (Benanteur, quoted in Kadid).
In the late 1950s, Benanteur began work on the second major axis of his oeuvre: printmaking and artist's books. Although Benanteur's printmaking occurs in parallel with his painting, he is careful to distinguish between his work in these two different media. In his 1500 artist books, which are typically collaborations with the artist's poet friends, Benanteur employs multiple printmaking supports, including copper, zinc, linoleum, steel, and wood. The first such book was Matinale de mon peuple (Morning of My People) (1961) by French-Algerian poet Jean Sénac. Many of Benanteur's books produced since have featured the work of contemporary Algerian poets and the Sufi mystics whose poetry his father first shared with him. Benanteur is personally involved in every stage of the production of these artists' books, including the typography design, something made possible in part by his job at a printing press in Paris. According to the artist, "chaque livre était une aventure, un envol - 'each book was an adventure, a flight' " (Benanteur, quoted in Kadid).
Benanteur's paintings and artists' books have been exhibited regularly throughout his career, particularly in Paris, including multiple solo and group exhibitions at Galerie Claude Lemand and a 2003 retrospective at the Institut du monde arabe, Paris, France.
