Some people dance their life away.
Some people dance with themselves.
Some people need a partner.
Tahar chose his partners: oil and pigments, turpentine and linseed…
Paint!
Not painting – as in “The History of Painting” (painting only provides a backdrop to Tahar art…)
A labor of love; no more, no less – that is what Tahar art is; a dance with matter (the smell of it; the sensuality of brushes caressing the canvas…)
And what comes out of it comes out of it!
Tahar was born French; in Tunisia; the third son of a brotherhood of three; in a good Sephardic family that would provide the backbone of French music industry for years, back in the old country.
Both his elder brothers became legends of music production for decades, in the hexagon.
Tahar also had a go at it, but his tastes in music were a bit too adventurous for the tepid French hearing ability.
He did not find anything deeply satisfying in it, and… on top of it, he wanted to travel!
This son of colorful landscapes and blinding suns loved nothing more than snow and ice and glaciers and whales.
Hence his many trips to both poles.
Is he trying to recapture the emotions of his early years, when he maculates the snowy quality of the virgin canvas with the colorful (though abstract) memories of his native North Africa?
We don’t know and he won’t tell.
Tahar is a secret man.
One has to be his friend for many years to gather that in his pantheon cohabite Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg and Eugene Delacroix.
Color, color, color…
Shape will follow – and it always does, in an (often times) surprising way.
Surprising to him, as much as to most of the viewers.
How comes that, out of this chaos of orgasmic energy, beyond good and bad taste, arises such harmony; such timeless beauty?
Who is to say?
Do not harass yourself with useless questions; just sit back and meditate; as the Maharishi said!
Tahar art’s is religious beyond religion; spiritual beyond spirituality; significant beyond significance; “brut”, as Dubuffet described; “calligraphic”, as Malraux eructed; away from fashions, schools and tendencies…
Essential – in a word.

Jean-Patrick Capdevielle

Exhibit Statement – RED

When you sit in the sun and close your eyes, what do you see: waves of red dancing inside you. You feel energized. You feel more alive!
RED is the color of exuberance, infinity, and mystery, because it has so many intricate layers of nuance and transparency. Any which way you treat RED, violent or soft, it has always a very magical and peculiar sense of grandeur. RED is Emotional. Red is Passionate. RED is the color of Love.