Selections published Anastasia Nysten's review of Land Survey, the solo exhibition by the Franco Tunisian painter Béchir Boussandel at Tabari in Dubai, on 2 February 2023. The magazine introduces Boussandel as an artist who lives and works in Lille, France, and graduated as a painter from the Dunkirk School of Fine Arts. His practice raises questions of identity, the nature of the space of time and the time of space, and he is preoccupied with the borders and boundaries between public and private space, a duality he foregrounds through everyday objects tied to territory, mobility and habitat.
Nysten walks readers through highlights from the show, noting how his compositions regularly combine motifs absorbed from ornamentation and the miniature portrait, and how desert plants able to flourish in harsh conditions recur across the canvases. His palette of fire oranges and reds speaks of twilight, she writes, a moment when one waits for the sky to touch the earth, yet the landscapes are deliberately composed without a horizon line. Works discussed include large canvases from 2022 such as Balloon Finder, Bateau de papier, Cloud and Flying Watermelon. The artist describes painting as "my territory, where the layers of paint are like geological strata."
Land Survey was Boussandel's first solo exhibition at Tabari in DIFC, and the gallery later presented his work again in a project travelling between B7L9 Art Centre of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in Tunisia and Tabari.