With my works, I subscribe to this lineage by nevertheless offering my own vision, pictorial and spiritual, which transforms being into a partition.
Yazid Oulab
Yazid Oulab was born in 1958 near Constantine in Algeria. Son of a mechanic and French teacher, he is also the nephew of writer Kateb Yacine.
As a teenager he often went to his uncle’s where he discovered the effervescence and intellectual dynamism of artistic circles. At 22, he decided to study art and did everything he could to be accepted at the National school of Fine Arts in Algiers. He spent nearly 6 years there before leaving for Marseille in 1988 to join the Lumigny Art School. He also worked in construction sites to pay for his studies, particularly in masonry, where he learned gestures and techniques valuable to his artistic practice.
In 2008 he participated in the exhibition Les Traces du Sacré, at the National Museum of Modern Art, Center Pompidou and was an artist in residence at the Calder studio from February to July 2009. He was selected this year to inaugurate the new building of the FRAC PACA on the occasion of Marseille European Capital of Culture 2013.
Yazid Oulab is a multi-facetted artist and a man with an old soul. His practice seems to be informed by centuries of rich and diverse civilizations. He is an interpreter and a messenger capable of analyzing and translating into simplified objects millennia of cultural, social and spiritual history.
Yazid Oulab is a craftsman in love with gesture, a fascinated and fascinating poet for whom the gaze generated the meaning, a tireless and potentially omniscient witness. He is the accomplished artist, a man who, far from the excesses of today’s society, would be ready to sacrifice his newly gained fame of art.
His works – objects, installations, sculptures and videos – represent tools of expression and communication that encourage us to consider the plurality of our times and measure the historical influence of all things.
Yazid Oulab is much more than an artist, he is a storyteller. He is a guide and a philosopher and he helps us discover or rediscover the origins of writing, numbers, spirituality, religions or Nations. Yazid Oulab is an artist or a frontier who creates connections, as the nail does; the nail is a recurrent element in his work.
ÂLIF BY YAZID OULAB
Discover in the video the various symbolisms of this nail.