Michel NEDJAR

Michel Nedjar, the man with dolls! He draws also, often in series, always by instinct, but the dolls undeniably constitute the trademark of his work. They are made of fabrics similar to those that Nedjar sold with his grandmother at the Clignancourt flee market. These old fabrics, “Schmattess,” as his mother called them in Yiddish, are preferred by the artist over the fine fabrics of his father’s tailor shop. The dolls are initially modelled on traditional dolls but are then gradually transformed into tortured, charred looking bodies. The artist thus exorcises the images he is obsessed with, namely the horror of the concentration camps, a horror that marked his family but which he discovered only in 1960 through the images of the film of Alain Resnais “Night and Fog.” Later, the dolls become multicoloured. They are no longer transformed by dye or mud, but bear “scars” that go through a body stuffed with objects. You can easily imagine a teapot appearing here, a doll’s shoe there… they carry a story, that of their author, that of the erstwhile owners of fabrics or objects. They are universal.