When you look up the definition of surrealism as an artistic movement, you find this description : a movement in the visual arts and in literature that occurred between the two world wars, and that was a reaction against cultural and political rationalism. In the world of painting, surrealism evokes images like those of the paintings of the Spanish artist Salvador Dali ( 1904 - 1989 ) and the Belgian artist Rene Magritte ( 1904 - 1967 ) for me, and I remember how I was hypnotized by their art when my father used to take us to see their artwork on our visits to museums in Belgium. Surrealism is interesting as an idea, because this movement in art showed the interior world of our perception as to the physical reality that surrounds us. So, we find ourselves in front of a house that wears a hat, or in front of a tree that is also a person, there are no limits to the rebellion against rationality that surrealism allows itself. This freedom allowed and allows artists to express themselves in bold fashion, and allows the creation of worlds and creatures that are a mixture of reality and dream, a kind of super - imposed, so sur - real reality. This movement existed between the two world wars and had an immense influence on the world of the arts and literature, philosophy, political ideology, theatre, music, sculpture and that influence continues today. In fact, surrealism seems to have become fashionably again these days, as a response to the uncertainty and banality of the post - industrial world, its disenchantment, the disillusion and loneliness of the world with its cities that seem like voracious monsters of glass and cement, and as a response also to the mistrust towards other cultures fed by the uncertainty of the future because of an exploding global population and an abused and tired nature. Daily life shows itself as insufficient, cold, we look for an explanation that is more tolerable, and surrealism allows this perspective. There is a photographic precision to surrealist art, and when I saw the photo of Lotfi Bouslah of Lolo Pics, that celebrates the statue of the two sharks of Aokas, I immediately felt a shiver : I was watching a surrealist tableau, the world of Salvador Dali.
First, we need an explanation for the reason of the shark statue. The nature photographer of Lolo Pics explained it to me this way : " The Berber word for shark is Aokas, and Aokas is called this in relation to the mountain Imma Tadrath. This mountain appears as the fins of a shark because the water level of the sea was higher than the actual town, so all this space of a sea and the mountain seen in profile appears as the fins of a shark above the water's surface. " This in and of itself is a already a beautiful surrealist image : the mountain transforms itself into a shark in the imagination of the spectator. The statue of the two sharks, that finds itself on RN9, between the beach and the entrance to the town, is made by a sculptor named Hamid Aftis, a laureate of the School of Fine Arts in Algiers, and it shows the two sharks life size, at 6 meters, made of resin and rescued metals, and separated by points of algae made of metal. The sculpture thus honours Aokas, the Bay of Sharks.
The photo of Lotfi Bouslah is very serene and shows the statue enveloped in a contrasting light : the light of the blue sky with its white clouds painted as were it by an oil brush, and the pale yellow light of the mountains and the pale blue of the sea in front of the statue, while the statue is painted in black, fine lines, like a shadow superimposed by a watercolour brush over the layer of bright colours of the sky, the sea and the mountains. The tableau evokes the silence before the beginning of a theatre piece, it is magnificent. Adding a spiritual element, there is a line of a vertical cloud, that rises like a mysterious smoke above the statue, as if the statue was a sacred vessel that holds the fire of the immortal spirits of the ancestors who protect Aokas. The photo is an enchanting scene, that has this beautiful tension that Lotfi Bouslah is able to create with his photography, this tension between intimacy and abstraction. The statue represents the soul and history of Aokas, and is at the center of a photo that at the same time celebrates the timelessness that nature surrounds us with, in this case, the sky, the sea, the mountains and the light of the sun. The colours also have a surrealist feel, and bring to mind the wide open pale blue sky of the paintings of Salvador Dali. Surrealism reminds us of photography, because of the precision of its tableaux, and the surrealist notes in this photo are unquestionable, and its is beautiful, since surrealism has a crush on photography and photography allows itself a dalliance with surrealism.The sky in the paintings of Salvador Dali is mysterious, forbidding, threatening even with the grandeur of its endless space. The sky in this photo of Lotfi Bouslah of the statue of the sharks gives me this same sensation, of a space that embraces the past, that lives the present, and that tries to intuit and decipher the sphinx that is the future. This photo has a seductive power, because of the forcefulness of its bold composition, and because of its calming and mysterious beauty of this silent, meditative scene. It is a marvelous quality of the photographic art of Lotfi Bouslah : he brings us into the world of his creation, without haste, without pretense; he invites in into his dream, and we want to stay.
Trudi Ralston
The information for the research on surrealism and the world of painting, and on Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The information on the history of the name Aokas, the Bay of Sharks, and on the sculptor Hamid Aftis, courtesy of nature photographer Lotfi Bouslah, and Wikipedia.
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