Djamel Tatah 
Born in 1959 in Saint Chamond
Lives and works in Montpellier
Djamel Tatah studied at the Beaux-Arts in Saint-Étienne. He was workshop manager at the Beaux-Arts in Paris from 2008 to 2023 

Since 1986, Djamel Tatah has been painting isolated human figures in oil and wax on white or colored backgrounds. He uses muted, dense colors. He does not tell stories and generally does not give titles to his paintings. He creates self-portraits or uses people from his circle as models, who become “generic figures” that he revisits over the years. His compositions, his large polyptychs, are inhabited by one or more life-size characters, who stand, hieratic, sometimes multiplied, in the space of the canvas. Walkers, recumbent figures, thinkers, witnesses—his figures allow him to experiment with an abstract representation of man in a process of repeating the same situations, placing him in a suspended state of time. These representations often interact with works he has retained from art history. In 2013, the MAMA in Algiers, the Villa Medici in Rome, and the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul de Vence dedicated a retrospective to him, which was followed by numerous exhibitions in France and internationally. 

Djamel Tatah said: “My painting is silent. Imposing silence in the face of the noise of the world is, in a way, adopting a political stance. It encourages us to take a step back and carefully observe our relationship with others and with society.”