Fakhri El Ghezal: D’eaux, de graines et de particules lumineuses

Fakhri El Ghezal (b. 1981, Akouda, Tunisia) is a Tunisian visual artist and independent filmmaker whose practice includes silver photography, video, painting, drawing and calligraphy, as well as hybridizations between these media. In El Ghezal's work, ‘it's always about light, about manifestation through light and in light’, which allows him to bring to light buried memories, to show both past and revealed traces.  

For his first exhibition at the gallery, entitled ‘D'eaux, de graines et de particules lumineuses’ (‘Of water, seeds and particles of light), Fakhri El Ghezal reveals a transversal narrative composed of drawings in which memory manifests itself through luminous apparitions made of chemistry and pigments. Using bleach and ink, these ‘vision-revelations’ emerge in the form of outcrops and superimposed sequences. They form dialogues with one another and reveal fragments of memories of the artist's prison experience and the confinements caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. In these moments of confinement, these artworks express a shared solitude, a return to a materiality and proximity that allow escape. 

The origin of this practice comes from a ‘plastic accident’, the encounter between bleach and colored paper. From this event, and through its repetition, the artist has developed a singular approach. During a period of self-directed residency, the repetition of movement and motif enabled him to find a form of peace. In the way of prayer beads, the recurrence of the gesture leads to a kind of meditative perdition, accompanied by the bleach process that reveals the light and questions the random.

The works on display in this exhibition date from the post-Covid years and represent both a continuity and an evolution in the artist's practice. The ink, like a revealing photographic emulsion, is altered by the chemistry of the bleach, which erodes the color, revealing cartographies and networks that lead us into the world of thoughts, as if through the sap-filled tubes of the phloem. In a sort of travelling shot, the exhibition shows the evolution of these forms on paper: from organic stains on small formats, the technique expands to become swarms of leaves on large formats. On the pages torn from the artist's notebooks, arranged in a network, we read the development of this random process, which ends up forming almost psychedelic visions. By multiplying plant elements, stains, shapes and celluloid evocations, the artist creates a kind of cinematic narrative. The works are grouped in sequences, which come alive in the viewer's eyes. Playing with the space in reverse, visitors descend to the basement of the gallery to see luminous constellations. Viewed zoomed out, the works on display form a nuclear network organized around a particular technique and graphic materiality.

Fakhri El Ghezal's work has been shown at numerous festivals, fairs and international exhibitions, including the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie in Bamako, Documenta 15 in Kassel, the New Museum in New York, the MUCEM in Marseille and the Centre d'art vivant in Tunis. He has taken part́ in the Rencontres Cinématographiques de Carthage in Tunisia, the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and the Clermont- Ferrand short film festival in France.