One might think that Thiers, a town with 12,000 inhabitants in central France that is known as a center of knife production, would have little connection to contemporary art, except, perhaps, as a source of tools for collage-making. Not so. Alongside the rushing Durolle river that once served the town’s industry, the Creux de l’Enfer or "Pit of Hell" — so named because it was a knife factory that provided terribly hot working conditions in the 19th century — became a contemporary art center in 1988. It holds annual exhibitions of the work of art students at the nearby Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyons and the Ecole Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Communauté as well as hosting two or three solo shows a year.

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Now, the Algerian-born French painter Djamel Tatah is showing his quietly mysterious paintings at the Creux de l’Enfer through September 19. A graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Saint Etienne, he divides his time between Paris and the Burgundy region and has shown his work in various European countries since 1992.

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Djamel Tatah’s work is a compelling combination of the ancient and the modern. He uses the age-old technique of wax painting — the same method used in the extremely well-preserved images on Egyptian sarcophagi from the 1st through 5th centuries. The men and women he depicts seem frozen, caught in everyday, repetitive gestures, like actors in a Beckett play. With serious looks and plain clothing that could come from any period, they stand aloof against brightly-colored geometric backgrounds. A certain isolation and melancholy emanate from these paintings, which exhibition curator and museum director Frédéric Bouglé likens in a statement to "a routine choreography of bodies ... translated with so much beauty that it expands the slightness of our gestures."