Larbi Zaidi

Truly passionate about ‘art brut’, Larbi, a native of Montbéliard in the Doubs region, creates work as demanding as it is spontaneous. This self-taught painter - ""these are the best,"" he says - lives and works in the Aisne region (France), where he settled twenty years ago. Attracted by painting at a very young age, he devotes all his time to this activity. Like many others, he would like to live only to do just that: ""This is not a hobby but a need,"" says the artist from Franche-Comte, who is anything but a Sunday painter. With a degree in Art Therapy from René Descartes University (Paris V), he works in social work (he became the head of an education department), and it is in the context of his professional activity that he has established pictorial expression workshops for children with disabilities. One feels in his work influences of Basquiat, Chaissac, and Dubuffet, painters he discovered later since he had no artistic education at the beginning of his career. Today, it is the opposite situation, and he diligently visits galleries, exhibitions, and museums.
Selected for inclusion on the ""Artension des Singuliers"" CD-ROM, he has participated in several group exhibitions. Among the most important of these are those organized by the Psychiatric Hospital of Peronne (France) as part of a symposium on art and madness, an exhibition at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris (France) and another at the Grande-Motte Autumn Art Fair (France). Today he would like to exhibit a little more often and have his own workshop because he now paints in his home in Chauny. Since June 2007, the auction of some of his works in the auction rooms of Neuilly and Rambouillet has allowed him it to be referenced in Artprice. His instinctive, joyful, and energetic painting is an ode to the drawings of children. It leaves no one indifferent. But the characters he depicts in thick black lines reflect a certain difficulty in being. Enclosed in frames they do not always master, they seek their own way in a sometimes hostile environment. Larbi's work is deeply humanistic.