HUMO: Hafid Bouazza is no blank slate: literary prodigy, an upbeat critic of Islam, but also a restless seeker of highs and big consumer of alcohol and drugs. Are you soulmates?

DUMAS: ‘Hafid is a complex figure, as a person and as a writer. He confuses people, I think, which keeps them from seeing a number of his vital qualities. His sense of humor, for instance. Or the nuance involved in his books. Hafid is no easy writer, you know. I often have to read his sentences twice.’

‘Are we soulmates? We both became famous at a relatively young age – Hafid especially – that’s one similarity. And we were both struck by the fact that people got excited about the subjects that we brought up – with him it was Islam, with me Israel/Palestine – which made them overlook the rest. Although in my case that wasn’t accompanied by so much fuss and sensational stories as it was with Hafid (laugh). I know nothing about his experiences with drugs. We don’t share those experiences. I’ve always been afraid of madness and memory loss. In day-to-day life alone I barely have a sense of direction, and can’t remember numbers or chronologies, so what would I be doing with drugs? I’m certainly a lot less obsessive than Hafid. (Laughs.) I’m much less consistent.’

HUMO: Drinking and getting drunk are recommended by you, though. ‘It has to be dark and you have to be drunk,‘ you wrote in the catalogue of your show at the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo.

Is that about making art? Is painting, with you, accompanied by a form of drunkenness?

DUMAS: (laughs) ‘Some of the things I say you shouldn’t take too literally. When I was younger, my work did often lead to getting drunk. That has to do with the total surrender needed to arrive at good art. You get so absorbed in what you do that nothing else matters, as in a high. Nowadays I’m intoxicated by art.

HUMO: I’ve heard that you mostly work at night, in artificial light.

DUMAS: ‘That’s right. And I like working on the floor. The best works start out that way: with the canvas on the floor and with me bending over it. As I get older that does get more difficult. It’s very hard on my back. Afterward, for days, I sometimes have trouble getting out of bed. During the day I sleep, I read, I mail, I make calls, arrange my stacks of old newspapers and listen to the wretched stories of others.’

HUMO: Do you paint every night?

DUMAS: ‘Oh, no! If there’s an exhibition coming up, I work nonstop. But once the deadline has passed and the works have left my studio, I sometimes don’t paint for months.

Then comes a period, usually, where I have an aversion to my own work. Actually I live and work in a very haphazard way. I’m easily distracted. I put off decisions endlessly, wrack my brains about questions I have to answer, as you’ve noticed (laugh). But even when I’m not working, everything revolves around my work and I’m busy day and night.’

PORN COLORS

HUMO: During the 1990s you became famous with quite explicit images referring to pornography. I remember your exhibition MD at M HKA in Antwerp. That was a succession of splayed-open vaginas and erect penises. How do you look back on that now?

DUMAS: ‘In the early nineties I had just turned forty and was full of life. Now I’m a grandmother of 66! Eroticism I’ll consider important until the end of my days, but porn is too boring for me now, and sometimes too scary. Suggestion is so much more interesting. The sexual act wasn’t in fact the theme of those paintings, and some of them were, in my view, not at all so explicit. The longer you looked at them, the less ‘in your face’ they became. (Ponders.) But people did see them as being pornographic. I keep on being fascinated by the way people look at images of genitals.’

HUMO: Hafid Bouazza is no blank slate: literary prodigy, an upbeat critic of Islam, but also a restless seeker of highs and big consumer of alcohol and drugs. Are you soulmates?

DUMAS: ‘Hafid is a complex figure, as a person and as a writer. He confuses people, I think, which keeps them from seeing a number of his vital qualities. His sense of humor, for instance. Or the nuance involved in his books. Hafid is no easy writer, you know. I often have to read his sentences twice.’

‘Are we soulmates? We both became famous at a relatively young age – Hafid especially – that’s one similarity. And we were both struck by the fact that people got excited about the subjects that we brought up – with him it was Islam, with me Israel/Palestine – which made them overlook the rest. Although in my case that wasn’t accompanied by so much fuss and sensational stories as it was with Hafid (laugh). I know nothing about his experiences with drugs. We don’t share those experiences. I’ve always been afraid of madness and memory loss. In day-to-day life alone I barely have a sense of direction, and can’t remember numbers or chronologies, so what would I be doing with drugs? I’m certainly a lot less obsessive than Hafid. (Laughs.) I’m much less consistent.’

HUMO: Drinking and getting drunk are recommended by you, though. ‘It has to be dark and you have to be drunk,‘ you wrote in the catalogue of your show at the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo.

Is that about making art? Is painting, with you, accompanied by a form of drunkenness?

DUMAS: (laughs) ‘Some of the things I say you shouldn’t take too literally. When I was younger, my work did often lead to getting drunk. That has to do with the total surrender needed to arrive at good art. You get so absorbed in what you do that nothing else matters, as in a high. Nowadays I’m intoxicated by art.

HUMO: I’ve heard that you mostly work at night, in artificial light.

DUMAS: ‘That’s right. And I like working on the floor. The best works start out that way: with the canvas on the floor and with me bending over it. As I get older that does get more difficult. It’s very hard on my back. Afterward, for days, I sometimes have trouble getting out of bed. During the day I sleep, I read, I mail, I make calls, arrange my stacks of old newspapers and listen to the wretched stories of others.’

HUMO: Do you paint every night?

DUMAS: ‘Oh, no! If there’s an exhibition coming up, I work nonstop. But once the deadline has passed and the works have left my studio, I sometimes don’t paint for months.

Then comes a period, usually, where I have an aversion to my own work. Actually I live and work in a very haphazard way. I’m easily distracted. I put off decisions endlessly, wrack my brains about questions I have to answer, as you’ve noticed (laugh). But even when I’m not working, everything revolves around my work and I’m busy day and night.’

PORN COLORS

HUMO: During the 1990s you became famous with quite explicit images referring to pornography. I remember your exhibition MD at M HKA in Antwerp. That was a succession of splayed-open vaginas and erect penises. How do you look back on that now?

DUMAS: ‘In the early nineties I had just turned forty and was full of life. Now I’m a grandmother of 66! Eroticism I’ll consider important until the end of my days, but porn is too boring for me now, and sometimes too scary. Suggestion is so much more interesting. The sexual act wasn’t in fact the theme of those paintings, and some of them were, in my view, not at all so explicit. The longer you looked at them, the less ‘in your face’ they became. (Ponders.) But people did see them as being pornographic. I keep on being fascinated by the way people look at images of genitals.’