The life of Hocine Ziani is read like a novel, even like a fairy tale. Born in Algeria some fifty years ago, of a modest family, alive in a village and an area which were not it less, it did not have a priori any reason to become one day the artist with the international fame which he became. Except that the small kid who it was had only one and single passion, which was worth to him besides to subtilize chalks of colors at the school of the village to be able to draw, to draw at all costs and everywhere. It had as a subject the nature and the village of its childhood, the inhabitants of this village, his own family, and its sketches multiplied ad infinitum. Well off all the cultural influences, Hocine Ziani was built, patiently, through tenacity and of perseverance, a personality and a manner of painting well with him. All its life, Hocine Ziani worked to improve its art, to affirm its style, mingling in its fabrics realism or the hyperrealism with the foregrounds with a semi abstraction which occupies the bottom of its composition. It is before any painter of its native Algeria, and the so particular light who reigns there. It recalled all the aspects of them, of the large scenes of battles which were ordered to him by the government, and which led it to recompute perspective, colors and compositions, in order to avoid at all costs the repetitions which it abhors, with the simplest scenes of the everyday life. Hocine Ziani was tested with all the kinds: portraits, died natures, landscapes, painting of history, fantasias, scenes of the Saharan life in all their ostentation and their splendour, as in their more extreme simplicity. Little by little, with the passing of years, Ziani went towards more examination and from purification, realizing that too many details, characters or objects kill the overall vision and weaken the composition. It then cultivated contrast between foreground and second plan, making disappear this one in a luminous dust similar to a mirage. Its works acquired of it a force and an evocative power without similar.

Clara Pozniakoff, 2005.