Discover the contemporary work of Hocine Ali Benali

After secondary studies in Algeria, Hocine Ali Benali enrolled at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts where he continued his studies in architecture. In this exceptional place in the heart of Paris, the student, who has been drawing and painting since childhood, regularly frequents art studios and museums. Very quickly, the first sketches reveal to him the possibility to articulate, to harmonize professional practice and expression of his sensitivity.

In a constantly renewed approach, the artist integrates the random as a dynamic of creation. Passionate about the arts, architecture and the relationships that these maintain with science and technology, he uses painting, a sincere gesture of love and anger, as he likes to define it, to make a relevant path in the chaos, to weave free frame of uncertain links, to give reality a taste of carelessness and happiness of living.

Pastels, oils, inks, acrylics or other techniques and supports offer this painter-architect the place of an incessant search for architectures without constraints, from simple forms to complex mirrors revealing at the bend of a line, a point, a trace, the simultaneous adventure of the sensitive and the real of men beyond borders and cultures. .

His first personal exhibition took place in November 1987 in Algiers.

Presentation of my artistic practice

A permanent plastic research activity, my artistic practice has always been supported by a random approach with a pressing need to give a social and aesthetic meaning to the touches of paint, the lines of my drawings, the materials that I manipulate, the photographs that I take.

Architect and visual artist painter, I have always understood the reality of architectural spaces to be designed, in their multiple dimensions, first in their plasticity in articulation with the requirements and desires of their recipients and intended uses. Painting and drawing are for me an act of permanent research of architectures without constraints.

Thus giving painting an architectural dimension nourishes my imagination and my desire to make my painted works a possible, real world, a universe to inhabit and experience. ”Creating a work is creating a world” said Wassily Kandinsky.

Painting the city with all that it covers with traces and aftereffects, with formlessness and hazards, with ingenuity and humanity is fundamentally what drives my approach. I use painting, drawing, photography, installation and architecture to defy the passage of time, to go beyond the visible to give back to the subject its share of carelessness, poetry, dream and universality.

All these media remain for me a way to capture fragments of memories in order to give the ephemeral a taste of eternity.