Artist

Dalel Ouasli

Birthplace

South of France

Living in

Aix en Provence and Paris

Education

self-taught

Medium

Oil Painting

Drawing

My works are a proposal for a meeting to bring us together, to unite us and to love us

Dalel Ouasli's pictorial universe is characterised by primitive forms, elementary colours and an eternal Mediterranean. One cannot date his portraits, marbled, timeless, which sometimes evoke Greek Antiquity, sometimes Cézanne's favourite land, sometimes the Maghreb. We can imagine the characters who populate his oils and pastels, slowed down by an overwhelming heat, seized by the rays of a burning sun that cuts the silhouettes into flat areas of colour with pronounced contrasts and sharp contours. Nevertheless, an invigorating force permeates his modern vestals with their statuesque appearance or his faces with their mask-like appearance. A love of the senses and of others too. Dalel Ouasli surrounds herself with artists who share her taste for the light of the South and the celebration of the power of the feminine. To put her work into perspective, she likes to quote the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran: "Just as the value of life is not in its surface but in its depths, things seen are not in their bark but in their core, and men are not in their faces but in their hearts.” Like her strong colours that fit together like pieces of a puzzle, the painter seeks behind our histories, our influences and our multiple, plural, relative, changing identities, the essence that unites them.

Text Sonia Pavlik