Painter
Tahar Ben Jelloun
“I try to paint the light of the world.” Against the darkness his novels confront, Tahar Ben Jelloun sets painting: pure colours, luminous geometries and a few words of poetry written along the edge of the canvas.
The artist
Career
Born in Fez on 1 December 1944, Tahar Ben Jelloun studied at the French lycée in Tangier and then philosophy at Mohammed V University in Rabat, where he wrote his first poems, collected in “Hommes sous linceul de silence” (1971). He settled in Paris in 1971, wrote for Le Monde from 1972 and earned a doctorate in social psychiatry in 1975. “L’Enfant de sable” (1985) made him famous, and its sequel, “La Nuit sacrée”, won the Prix Goncourt in 1987. A member of the Académie Goncourt since 2008, he is among the most translated French-language writers in the world.
Painting as a counterweight
He drew before he wrote, but painting became a sustained practice only late in his life. He describes it as a counterweight to his books: a way of offering light where his writing explores the darker side of the human. His canvases, painted in Paris and in Morocco, play on flat colour, rhythm and the presence of the word, short poetic phrases that frame the image.
Landmarks
- 2015 — Galerie du Passage, Paris, with the book “Poèmes peintures”
- 2017 — “J’essaie de peindre la lumière du monde”, Institut du monde arabe, Paris, his first exhibition in a French museum
- 2022 — “La couleur des mots”, L’Atelier 21, Casablanca
- 2025 — Exhibition at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rabat
Collections
- Institut du monde arabe, Paris
- Villa Harris, Musée de Tanger
- Fundació Yannick i Ben Jakober, Majorca
- Museo San Salvatore in Lauro, Rome
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In the same spirit
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