Biography

Born in Algeria on September 27, 1949 in Ksar Chellala, on the border of the desert, attended the Academy of Liège and finished his artistic studies in 1976. Back in Algeria, he was a professor in the artistic education of Cherchell, a town located in the Waterside. In constant search of a home port, he comes and goes between Algeria and Belgium and has lived in Liège since 1988.

Painter of emotion, Djamel Merbah associates research of forms and gestural research. After a period of maturation during which the artist asks himself questions about inner and daily life, he paints spontaneously to achieve a non-preconceived expression.

Celebrated internationally, the artist Djamel Merbah has received numerous awards. He has exhibited in several countries: Algeria, Germany, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Portugal. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world. One cannot pass in front of a painting by Djamel Merbah without stopping there and stopping there one could not receive it without summoning the sensitive intelligence of the eye. A first look, whether or not it is the result of an inadvertence, will emerge dazzled from a sacred perimeter where the artist has circumscribed the softest of lights as well as the most ardent of fires. Let the gaze linger - moreover, how could it do otherwise - and it is the "line" itself, that which obeys the prescriptions of the formal and by which the figurative establishes its genre, it is this feature that challenges us. It is worth following him when, capturing the woman while giving her the most radiant of freedoms, he embraces, at the borders of the intangible, both the curve that is diluted and the line that is broken... Because it is precisely inside these voluntary "failures" of the circumference that the landmark of meaning is located. It is not a question of affirming This is a woman or This is a party and thus "closing" the legend. The painter will prefer the paradoxical title "Untitled" to any explicit designation, retained with regard to the freedom to appropriate the work by interpreting it in his own way...
- IMDb mini biography by: Liliane GUISSET