Slimen Elkamel

Biography
"To each story, its story, its body and its own being. Art feeds on the stories we weave around it, just as a person has his or her founding story, which thus inscribes him or her in the fabric of past and future encounters."
– Slimen Elkamel
The childhood of Slimen Elkamel was nourished by popular stories and shaped by the imagination of a rural environment where the tradition of storytelling and poetry prospered.
 
His studies at the Tunis Institute of Fine Arts allowed him to crystallize this literary and intellectual heritage into a unique artistic practice. A practice whose genesis opens through writing and draws its resources from texts, sometimes poetic or literary, sometimes memoirs or improvisations. The daily writing exercise, as much as it delimits, expands the horizons of Slimen Elkamel's artistic universe. Not far from free figuration, the artist questions the relationship between reality and imagination through the theatricalization of the starred image.
 
The figure of a reality levitates in the space of an imagination and a prolific effervescence where the transfiguration of social and popular fact into a surrealist vision is played out. Images of memory and images of reality, taken from everyday media, intersect in a pictorial field where, on the surface of the painting, the rustling of a never-ending dialogue begins, not for the narration of a fact, but for a celebration of stories. The artist has just had an exhibition entirely dedicated to his work at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, one of the most prestigious institutions in the French capital.
Works
Art Fairs