Lumières des oasis

Lumières des oasis is a solo exhibition of paintings by Fayçal Berkat at the Galerie d'Art Aïcha Haddad on rue Didouche Mourad in Algiers, from 17 to 27 October 2026. The Établissement Arts et Culture de la Wilaya d'Alger organises the show, and entry is free. The organiser presents a set of works that take their cue from oasis landscapes and the natural world. The image released for the show is a work on paper: a palm grove in bright greens, yellows and violets, with a pale path running between banks of undergrowth.

Berkat was born in Biskra and has made the city and its surroundings his main subject. He is self-taught. He started out drawing and making pictures with sand, then moved to oil on canvas and watercolour on paper. Press accounts of his earlier shows tie his handling to realism and impressionism. He also looks to Algerian and foreign painters who caught the light and colour of the Algerian desert.

His exhibition Hanin al-Amakin at the same gallery in 2024 brought together 38 paintings, nearly all of them of Biskra. They recorded sites such as the Landon garden, El Guentra and the village of Chetma. They also showed buildings that have since been lost or neglected, among them the Royal hotel and the railway station. In 2025 he showed 28 works under the title Amakine at Galerie Ezzou'Art in Algiers, and Touches followed at Galerie Aïcha Haddad in December.

For Touches he painted the houses of the Chetma ksour in watercolour, working from photographs he had taken himself. Oil landscapes of El Kantara, Mchouneche and the El Ghoufi gorges hung alongside views of Algiers, including the Casbah and the Grande Poste. The new exhibition stays with the oasis settings that run through this earlier work.