Béchir Boussandel

His canvases do without a horizon line. Without it there is no longer an above or a below, no foreground: the eye flies over territories that nothing situates. Small figures move across them, each defined by a tool, surveyors, gardeners, delivery men, shoe shiners, scattered over the expanse without hierarchy. None of them governs the composition; everything happens at the edges. Miniature, in his hands, does not shrink the world: it gives the world back its breadth.

The bird returns from one work to the next. Modelled in clay, then cast in brass, copper or aluminium, it perches on glass bottles or watches over visitors from the top of the partitions; one ongoing set numbers a hundred and fifty-six of them, each carrying the map of a country. It stands for the one who crosses borders, and raises with him the question of the right to move. La Valse comes of the same gesture: the coastlines of the twenty-two Mediterranean countries are set upright and folded around an axis, modelled in three dimensions, then cast in ceramic and blown glass. Assembled, these silhouettes of three to six metres make a single form in which the national outlines can no longer be told apart.

Residencies: Jardin Rouge, Montresso Art Foundation, Marrakech (2023); Elyssa project, Institut français de Tunisie, Palais Kheireddine, Tunis (2025). Recent solo exhibitions: Tenté par d’autres soleils, B7L9, Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis (2025); Tempted by other suns, Tabari Artspace, Dubai (2025); Earth’s Skin, Montresso Art Foundation, Marrakech (2024); The Sun Sets in the East, Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2022). His work is held by the Ministry of Culture and Youth, Abu Dhabi, the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, MACAAL in Marrakech and the Montresso Art Foundation.