Djabril Boukhenaïssi’s new series of paintings are the result of various encounters: with a fresco in an old monastery; with the poetry of Baudelaire, Rilke and Novalis; and with the routine yet mysterious phenomenon that is the night. The latter is a longstanding preoccupation. Boukhenaïssi is interested in night-time as a form of wilderness, a time when absence — of light, of people, of activity — makes it possible to escape the rational, materialistic sensibilities of twenty-first century life. Of course, night as it once was has all but disappeared. The darkness we experience is weaker, the stars vastly less numerous and this has had an under-acknowledged effect on all of us. It also poses a profound challenge to artists.
The paintings respond to a residency Boukhenaïssi completed at the Abbey of Fontfroide, in the south of France. The former Cistercian monastery, not far from the Spanish border, is remote enough to enjoy nights of profound darkness, and its library is home to a pair of paintings, entitled simply Day and Night, by the French Symbolist Odilon Redon. The latter, far from portraying the night as a time of reduced visibility, depicts it as a hallucinatory canvas for the imagination, an enchanted realm of yellow mists, magenta leaves and fluttering phantasmagoria.
Boukhenaïssi, alone in the abbey, entrusted with its large ancient key, seized this rare opportunity to study Redon’s fresco up close and at length. The series that arose from his stay marks the second chapter of an investigation he has been engaged in since a show last year in Arles, in which he meditated on the colonisation of the darkness, the retreat of the night as another form of destruction of the natural world (the project won him the inaugural Lee Ufan Arles and Maison Guerlain’s Art & Environment Prize). This new set of canvases investigates this theme in a different setting, broadening and deepening the angles of approach.
The form, and mood, of the abbey is a constant presence. The crossed shape of Fontfroide’s stained glass ‘rose window’, reminiscent of the club in a deck of cards, is one visual motif. The two largest canvases offer complementary versions of the same scene: a low wall, a gate, a pair of figures with an ambiguous bearing, a sculpture or memorial in the space beyond. The moth known in French as the papillon de nuit or ‘butterfly of night’ is a frequent subject in Boukhenaïssi’s night works, and reappears here. And as with Redon, the night of these images is not only one of sombre darkness but filled with apparitions and luminous colour, like visions of reality filtered through the haze of a lucid dream.
Or through the prism of the artist’s literary sensibilities, perhaps: a tree can be taken as a tree, the moon as the moon, but they are also symbols and moods, as in a poem. Indeed, these works also arise from Boukhenaïssi’s relationship with literature. For lengthy periods, the artist will pursue an interest along the connected paths of poetry, art history, science and philosophy. He might barely paint at all for a time, preferring to assemble the desired field of meaning, returning to the canvas only when an idea or feeling demands to be expressed there.
One touchstone is Novalis’s poem cycle Hymns to the Night (1797), in which “the holy, the unspeakable, the secretive Night” is channelled as a place of solace and healing. Another is Rilke’s collection Poems to Night (1916), harnessing the night’s qualities as a moment when we can reconnect, beyond our fates as finite individuals, with the unknowable vastness of which we are ultimately part. But perhaps the central inspiration here is Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Windows’ (1869), with its insight that, “He who looks out at the world from an open window never sees as many things as he who looks at a closed window. There is nothing deeper, more mysterious, more fruitful, more shadowy, or more dazzling than a window lit by a candle.” (We do in fact witness a figure through a window in one painting, though the scene is vastly different to that of Baudelaire’s telling.)
A painting, a true painting, wrote John Berger, touches “an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware.” In these canvases — where deep blues, mauves and spectral yellows are wielded with suggestive aplomb — absence gives rise, paradoxically, to a kind of abundance, one that can only arrive when certain superficial distractions are swept away. Night has always been a form of wilderness. Whatever control we exert over our surroundings is fatally compromised once the light fades, so it was natural to wish to conquer the night, to banish it, as we’ve banished almost all dangerous places and creatures, but at what cost?
As Boukhenaïssi’s beloved romantics realised, a wilderness also implies an encounter with the sublime. Novalis, Rilke and Baudelaire were writing in the aftermath of night’s first death, which was both metaphysical and metaphorical: the end of night-time as a mystery in the face of advancing human knowledge. These visions of an old French abbey explore what an artist’s response — what Boukhenaïssi’s response — should be, now that night’s disappearance is more literal, more consequential, and, quite possibly, more final.
Text by: Seb Emina
Once upon a midnight dreary will be on view November 15, 2025 through January 10, 2026.
