Mounia Bensaid

Painter by vocation and personal will to express feelings and sensations other than by word, Mouna Bensaïd, native of Tangier, her last works marked with the seal of the Woman, that it is sublime, tearful, absent, omnipresent, naked, Covered, offered or modest.

I was present at her opening in Paris in the Rosenberg gallery at 21 rue La Boétie in Paris in 2015 to cover the event. In these photos you can see the works of Mouna Bensaïd where the woman suffers, laughs, cries, dominates, controls or sudden, but it is, each time, in its hieratic beauty, to each of its “states of souls” Make her paintings masterful works …

To overcome adversity, to silence suffering, to go beyond propriety and impose alterity: that of a woman, multiple, kaleidoscopic and ambiguous ….

The pictorial quest of Mouna Bensaid recounts this plunge into the abyss of intimate pain and then the rise to the light. Each work, in a scripted approach, is expressed as much by what the frame says explicit as by the mysteries of the high field. And we must beware of the evidence of meaning and representation.

Appearances are always misleading. It is then that the woman is chained that she is drunk with freedom. It is when it appears in majesty that it seems the most fragile. It is in nudity that she protects herself, in the coldness of the marble, that she sculpts her sensuality, behind the ornaments she conceals her confusion, and when she seems to be pouting, she is the most disturbing.

Mouna Bensaid’s wife is broken and resilient, chained and conquering, pure and sullied, quartered and totemic, defeated and violent. Let us not be mistaken: there is no trace of a so-called feminine sensitivity, above all, no indulgence, an indestructible will, an almost brutal oniric efficacy, a formidable force of expression.

What could be read as the manifesto of a rebellious Arab femininity is first and foremost a free work, out of norms, out of fashions, out of speech, coming from the depths and fundamentally rebellious. (Source: Babelfan)