The exhibition ALIF, A Journey into Salim Le Kouaghet's World is an invitation to enter the world of a painter of memory, signs and exile. It marks a historic moment: for the first time, Salim Le Kouaghet's work is being presented in Algeria, his native country, after a long career in France and abroad.
The title ALIF refers to the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, a symbol of origin, verticality and beginning. This letter runs through all of Salim Le Kouaghet's work like a column of meaning, an endless point of departure. Stylized, reinvented, confronted with other spellings, it becomes the matrix of a unique pictorial language.
Since the 1970s, Salim Le Kouaghet has produced a dense body of work marked by the wounds of the Algerian war, the experience of exile and the reinvention of memory. In his canvases, he superimposes layers: Amazigh signs, free writing, coloured bands, textures and fragments of memories.
His work is inhabited by concrete places: Aïn Askar, D'Arcy-Sainte-Restitue, Oran, Paris, London... but also by symbolic spaces: the empty house, the destroyed douar, the vanished garden, Wast-ed-Dar. He brings together the intimate and the political, tradition and modernity, rupture and continuity.
After exhibiting in London and then Paris, ALIF is settling in Oran as a way of closing a loop or opening it up in a different way. This return, far from being nostalgic, reactivates the questions that run through all his work: What remains of a lost place? How do you write what you can't say? What happens to identity when it has no fixed territory?
ALIF is less a retrospective than a journey. A journey through signs, pain and light. A plunge into a sovereign pictorial world, traversed by history.
