Djabril Boukhenaïssi: The Night as Revelation

For his first solo exhibition in the United States, Djabril Boukhenaïssi unveils Once upon a midnight dreary, a new series of paintings and engravings meditating on Night — as a realm of contemplation, wilderness, and resistance to the relentless brightness of the contemporary world.

Born from a residency at the Abbaye de Fontfroide in southern France, the series enters into dialogue with the work of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, while drawing inspiration from the writings of Baudelaire, Rilke, and Novalis. In Boukhenaïssi’s work, night is not absence but presence — a dense, living substance where color becomes inner light. Deep blues, spectral yellows, and translucent mauves transform darkness into a site of memory and imagination.
The artist reflects on the disappearance of true night, dimmed by modern light pollution, and how this loss alters our relationship to mystery, dream, and the sublime.

Between painting and poetry, Once upon a midnight dreary imagines how art can respond to the vanishing of wildness and silence — restoring to the night its power of revelation and enchantment.