Selections Arts, the Dubai-based arts magazine, published a review by Anastasia Nysten of Land Survey, the solo exhibition by Franco-Tunisian painter Béchir Boussandel at Tabari Artspace, Dubai, held from 1 to 27 February 2023. The piece situates the show within Boussandel's training at the Dunkirk School of Fine Arts and his current studio practice in Lille, France, and frames the work as an exploration of identity, territory and time through everyday objects.
Nysten walks through a group of large 2022 oil and acrylic canvases, including Balloon Finder (200 x 175cm), Bateau de papier (150 x 200cm), Cloud (300 x 200cm), Le vent souffle (150 x 200cm), Flying Watermelon (200 x 200cm), and the paired works The Shepherd and Skateman (each 200 x 200cm). She notes Boussandel's deliberate avoidance of hierarchy and centrality in his compositions, and his recurring motifs of desert plants, migrating birds and levitating fruit, set against a palette of fire oranges and reds that suggest twilight without ever fixing a horizon line. The artist is quoted describing his process: painting is, he says, comparable to "my territory, where the layers of paint are like geological strata."
Land Survey marked Béchir Boussandel's first solo presentation with Tabari Artspace and set out the vocabulary of territory and layered surface that the artist has continued to develop since, including in his later glass and mixed-media work. Readers coming from this review should look next at the Land Survey exhibition page, which gathers installation views and the full checklist from the Tabari Artspace show.
