Karim MEZIANI

Karim Meziani, a voyage to the land of the Berbers!

I don’t know you, Mr. Méziani, and yet, looking at your canvases is like looking back into my own memories. They seem to offer a voyage into eternity, vastness and the galaxy. I imagine that, in another life, on another planet, you have already met us mere earthlings, and told us the story of your people, who, all of a sudden, rise up again to flood us with their beauty and move us by their fragility.
During our interview, you evoke your meeting Chagall at the faculty two years before his death, and arrival in France from your native Algeria at the age of 16 to study painting. After a short stay at the Villa Arson, you spent a few years at the faculty of literature to study the history of art, which has been a passion for you since childhood.
“I began painting when I was 13, working in the dark using olive oil and gouache. I painted Buddha in blue because it represents the confrontation of colors, it develops, deforms and travels. I complement it by the use of gold leaf.”
Lets talk about the gold leaf, a common denominator in your pictures, as if it occupied the tabernacle of your tent, swaying in a fragile universe, like a meeting point. I understand, as you have probably understood for centuries, that it’s not the commercial value of this gold that is important, as this concept is alien to your philosophy of life, but the values that you hold so dear; meeting people, the passion for art, the esthetic beauty of painting and maybe, subconsciously, the idea that nomadic people carry their gold (the women their bracelets) and their history wherever they go.
You are Berber of origin but have become firmly attached to Nice; “I was born in the town of Batna, in the Orasses, where the people are hard and proud and blood must flow to repair a wrongdoing. France is a magnificent country that welcomed me with open arms when I realized Algeria was racing towards catastrophe.”
To earn a living, Karim became a forger, «For a short time I copied works and sold them but then I took a workshop in Nice and decided to do my own paintings. I wanted to use blue but the problem was that Klein had monopolized the colour; how can anyone monopolize the colour of the sea and the sky? It seemed senseless, so I decided to take it a step further and develop my own pigments, which I bought in Italy and used to create a very different blue »
A stroll though your work opens up very personal perspectives. Your blue is a beautiful country, inviting us to explore, the story of a legend, a night sky peopled with golden stars, a firmament of unsuspected adventures, a maze of emotions never to be satisfied. Your blue, Mr Meziani, is a never-ending quest for the joy of living a balanced life, on the border of good and evil, the hope of an intimate voyage to the depths of the history of a people in perpetual movement. Perhaps your blue is you.
« An artist is chosen by painting and invaded by it’s passion; it’s an illness, something very strong, that comes from inside.

So, Mr. Meziani, if you don’t mind, we will admire your paintings.



Janny Plessis Lumeau