Melik Ouzani, Charlot, Donald et Mickey, 2005, Acrylique et Spray sur toile, 200 x 300 cm. |
Melik Ouzani's Use of Black Overwriting on His Paintings since the 1990s |
Melik Ouzani, Site Improbable, 2004, Acrylique sur toile, 280 x 280 cm.
Melik Ouzani, Passage Eclair au soleil Noir, 2006, Acrylique sur toile, 162 x 130 cm. |
Galleria Il Trifoglio Nero Melik Ouzani was born in Vichy in 1942 and until 1974 worked as a draughtsman and model-maker. Influenced by American Pop Art, he started painting a series of works influenced by his reading of Lichtenstein. His first solo exhibition at the PEC Gallery in Annecy in 1975 was soon followed by a second at Utop’Arts in Paris. In 1979 he founded (alongside Jacques Chinn, Matthias Perez and Andre Labrosse) the Nuit Blanche collective and ran the gallery of the same name for several years. At first he funnelled the colour in his paintings by the use of glue, a process he abandoned in 1985 with the start of his ‘peintures monumentales’ (Zulu Fiesta 1984 & 85). From then, perhaps influenced by his own time spent in New York, graffiti, explosions of garish colour, spray enamel and acrylic and collage constructed of torn papers began to invade his work. From the 90s onwards his black writing covering entire canvases has taken over (Basta, Game Over 1991, Picnic 1991-2). Melik Ouzani has lived and worked in Paris (Aubervilliers) since 1979. In 2006 Ouzani’s Quat Chemins appeared in Le Noir est une couleur at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence. Dominique Paini, the then director of the Fondation, wrote this in the Walls section of the catalogue describing Ouzani’s work alongside that of another artist included in the exhibition, Jean Dubuffet. "The black background of the Jean Dubuffet series non-lieux is like that of urban walls, exposed to the cries of opportunistic artists who scribble and scratch, who graffiti and incise the topmost layer of the numerous coats of markings deposited by generations of street kids. The walls have become clandestine blackboards whose inscriptions can revenge scholastic humiliations. "Melik Ouzani, younger than Dubuffet by almost forty years, was nonetheless a kind of contemporary. The brutality of his graffiti, which often allude to Disney comics as well as street writing, propose a kind of expressionism unfamiliar to the French tradition and which calls to mind Basquiat. These black grounds are anecdotic: Dubuffet proclaims them in his title, and Ouzani, who doesn’t have contempt for pure colours at other moments, finds in the them a screen to accentuate the violence and the impulsive character of his white strokes." Melik Ouzani exhibitions include Le Coucou présente Ouzani – Le Coucou, Paris, 2006; Le Noir est une couleur – Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, 2006; Works on Papé– Halles aux Grains, Saint-Julien, 2006; and Il Etait une Fois Walt Disney– Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris / Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montrèal, Canada, 2006-2007. |
Melik Ouzani, Charlot, Donald et Mickey (coleur), 2005, Acrylique et Spray sur toile, 200 x 300 cm. |
