Figure 1: An inscription that reads “Justice for Nahel” on a street wall in Nanterre, France, September 2023. Photograph by the author

Nanterre. June 27, 2023. This multi-ethnic Parisian suburb witnessed a brutal murder that ignited a month-long civic upheaval. Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of North African descent, was fatally shot at point-blank range by a police officer during a traffic check. As I walk from the Nanterre-Préfecture station months later, the gleaming glass façades of tower blocks paint a well-kept suburban picture, though discontent, disquiet, and dissent linger in nooks and crannies. Landmarks along Boulevard Émile Zola bear the poignant marks of conflict—charred rubble, shattered windows, walls inscribed with demands for “Justice for Nahel” (Fig.1).

This text is a meditation on love and violence, centered on the life and work of Choukri Mesli, the late Algerian painter and co-founder of Aouchem—an artist collective pivotal in reshaping post-independence Algerian aesthetic modernism through their invocation of Maghrebian and Indigenous Amazigh visual forms. Mesli’s story is entwined with Nanterre, where he found sanctuary in 1994, escaping the protracted civil war in Algeria (1992–2002). Exiles of this sort grotesquely twist out of shape the idea of home, of belonging. When I meditate on the love of one’s home, people, and community, which is at times coined, if reductively, patriotism or nationalism, Mesli stands out as an illustratively complicated figure.

Figure 2: A terracotta pitcher from the Kabylie region in Northern Algeria featuring traditional motifs and colors. Photograph by the author

Still, nationalism mattered when Mesli was painting. Algeria had spent 132 years under French rule—from the capture of Algiers in 1830 through the eight-year war that ended in 1962. Independence arrived, and with it the question of what it meant to be Algerian. Intellectuals and artists took up the work of making a national culture. For over a century, European Orientalists had been the ones representing Algeria; now Algerians would represent themselves. As a result, a generation of painters emerged—most trained in French art academies—with a specific task: create a national school of painting. Make pictures that were unmistakably Algerian. Develop a visual language that spoke of cultural heritage and, at times, revolutionary ideals. Mesli came into his own from this context. His paintings respond to the demands of a newly sovereign state that needed to see itself reflected in art that was unmistakably its own. This does not make him a patriot or a nationalist in any simple sense. But he was certainly wrestling with the problem of what it meant for an aggregate of people to now constitute themselves as a nation.

Figure 3: The catalog for the exhibition “Palimpsests of Tin Hinan,” 1990, Centres Culturels Français en Algérie. Photograph by the author

Welcomed by Tarik, Mesli’s fellow artist son, I step into his Nanterre abode, now inhabited solely by his widow, Annick. Every inch of the apartment reflects Mesli’s enduring presence: his gouaches cloak the walls, while cabinets display items from his trips, including Indigenous Kabyle and Tuareg objects whose decorative motifs often appear in Mesli’s own paintings (Fig. 2). The coffee table, bedecked with monographs and exhibition catalogs, transforms the living room into a miniature Mesli museum (Fig. 3). Meanwhile, a closed door conceals a room chock-a-block with his works packaged in cellophane.

Mesli loved Algeria but suffered tremendously in exile, voluntary or otherwise. Studying in France was the main ticket to higher education in Algeria during the ‘50s, and the French government continued to offer scholarships until 1985. Mesli studied at École supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris between 1954 and 1960. In 1956, the artist’s scholarship was rescinded due to his vocal opposition to the war against the Algerian people. The agony of living in a country responsible for atrocities against his kin weighed heavily. During the two-year hiatus from school, he sought to overcome his sense of failure by continuing to paint independently. Ultimately, he became the first Algerian to receive a diploma from the École supérieure des beaux-arts, a distinction he took great pride in. Looking back, what this acknowledgment from the colonizer meant for Mesli remains unclear, particularly when one ought to consider the ways modern politics may cloud our interpretation of the past. Still, he never lost his enthusiasm for painting, a sign I take to mean that if he kept on painting, he could then go on to teach others his love of the medium.

Exile persisted as Mesli spent two years teaching in Morocco before returning to post-independence Algiers in July 1962. In October of that year, he assumed a faculty position at École des beaux-arts d’Alger, then under the directorship of Bachir Yellès. Recounting his early years back home after a prolonged absence, Mesli stated, “For five years, I did not go to France; I wanted to be under the Algiers sun, to return to my ancestors in order to find myself.”[1]

Figure 4: Choukri Mesli, *Untitled,* c.1990s, gouache on cardboard. Photograph by the author

Since gaining independence from the French, Algeria has operated under a one-party regime. Following the 1988 riots, the government opened the door for parties other than the National Liberation Front (FLN) to run for office. In the early 1990s, during elections where the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) seemed poised for a majority, the military intervened, triggering a deadly confrontation between the army and extremist Islamist groups and leading to what is now known as the “Black Decade.” As the death threats from Islamist groups and the assassination of intellectuals grew rampant, Denis Martinez, Mesli’s close friend and fellow Aouchem co-founder, persuaded him to leave the country. In 1994, the exile bells rang anew, and he joined the ranks of several Algerian artists who sought refuge in France. His life, as his student Abderahmane Ould Mohand tells me, was marginally spared by his departure in the wake of the assassination of Ahmed Asselah, then director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and his son Rabah Salim, a student there, inside the school premises on March 5, 1994. [2]

Mesli’s love for Algeria materializes through a stylized and overtly sensuous female figure (Fig. 4). How can we identify her? Her form is shapely, her legs long and tapering; she boasts a cinched waist and brawny thighs that contrast dramatically with her thin, wilted head. She is undaunted. She is at times named after localities, such as Tlemcen (Fig. 5), a city in northwestern Algeria and the birthplace of Mesli, or the light that irradiates the colors of the capital, such as Algiers’ Sun; at other times, she stands for the legendary Tin Hinan, the ancestor queen of Amazigh peoples. This leitmotif, present since the 1960s, marks a dual departure—philosophical and stylistic—from the Paris school that initially shaped Mesli’s artistic sensibility and illustrates how the artist sought to reclaim and reinhabit a storied landscape. In this sense, the Meslinian female figure appears to us as a homecoming, a symbolic embodiment of Algeria itself.

Figure 5: Choukri Mesli, *Tlemcen (5)*, 1999, oil on canvas. Photograph by the author

Moreover, throughout the Saharan plateaus, you will find outstanding rock paintings and vivid pictorial narratives dating back millennia (Fig. 6). Looking more closely, it appears that Mesli’s depictions of women evoke elements of prehistoric Saharan art, where we find analogous, stylized human figures. It is no secret that Mesli drew inspiration from the iconography of the Tassili n’Ajjer plateau; in fact, the opening line of Aouchem’s 1967 manifesto states as much: “Aouchem was born thousands of years ago on the walls of a cave in the Tassili Mountains.” Through this lens, Mesli’s female figure readily appears as an envoy of an ancient past, and in this way, the Sahara becomes painted onto what is then defined in less than inclusive terms as Algeria.

Figure 6: Paintings on a rock surface from the Pastoral Period, 7,200+ BP–3,000 BP, Bouhedyen, Tadrart Rouge, Tassili n’Ajjer, Southern Algeria. Photograph by the author

The love and devotion that Mesli’s art effuses are what truly inspired me to write these words, even though one might admittedly find the idea of loving Algeria—or any nation-state—fraught, given the prolonged histories of invasion, colonialism, authoritarianism, and Indigenous marginalization across the Northern African landscape. I may well take stock in my deeply felt love for Mesli’s oeuvre, but I often wondered about its appeal or if there was a singular work that drew me in. Yet, I am stumped by one fundamental question: What does it mean for an art historian to love a work of art? Perhaps this “love” is not the greatest animator of intellectual inquiry, if only because it balks certain tough questions, lest we stop loving the work. “Love is blind,” the famous maxim goes, after all. I am becoming increasingly confident, however, that, at the very least, it is Mesli’s own love that animates my inquiry. His aesthetic expression strikes me as a profound and generative riposte to violence that is unrelenting; just as you think you have won the fight against one oppressor, another pops up—not unlike whac-a-mole—amounting to a perverse litany of subjugation.

Figure 7: Choukri Mesli, *Untitled*, gouache on paper, c. 1990s. Photograph by the author

Mesli’s work, while seemingly appropriating prehistoric Saharan rock art, actually does a great deal more by acting as a theoretical gesture that both grounds his work in a specific geographical context and emphasizes his appreciation of local knowledge and local actors (Fig. 7). He loved his people—those living and those who had gone before—and the land that nourished their poetry, their tales, their visual expressions. When precisely violence took hold in these parts of Africa is a question we would be hard-pressed to answer. The Arab invasion, perhaps? And what about the Ottoman Empire? French colonization? One-party rulership? The culprits, from conquerors to colonizers, are bountiful. It feels as though violence has always been a part of our history. And Mesli’s response to that history was love. Admittedly, not the kind that advocated loving your oppressor by, say, turning the other cheek—a stance he made crystal clear when he picketed outside his school in Paris—but the curative, transformative kind that reminded his fellow Algerians who they were and where they came from; it reconnected them to their ancestors and brought about healing from centuries of brutal conflict. After all the bloodshed that has befallen this land and its people, I look to Mesli’s work as a guidepost that led many to that crucial remembrance.

References:
[1] Françoise Liassine, Choukri Mesli (Alger: Enag Editions, 2002), 33, 39.

[2] Abderahmane Ould Mohand, personal communication with the author, September 26, 2023.

Loving Algeria: Choukri Mesli’s Riposte to Violence