Dark

The writer Hafid Bouazza was translating Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris into Dutch when he died in 2021. Marlene Dumas had made the illustrations for this volume. Begun in 2018, this work, titled Dark, has over time become a souvenir portrait of a dying Hafid Bouazza. 

Dumas used this work to illustrate prose poem XVIII, Invitation to the Voyage:
“Dreams, always dreams! And the more ambitious and delicate the soul, the more the dreams sail away from the possible. We all carry our own dose of natural opium that we are constantly secreting and replenishing. From our birth to our death, how many hours are filled with a sense of elation and success? Will we ever live, will we ever stay in this painting that my mind has painted, this painting that resembles you?” (Excerpt).