At times when Western settler-colonialism continues to exonerate itself from moral and political condemnation, when disfigurements of history are perpetuated, our consciousness is alarmed, imminently and triumphantly, to the perils and injustices of imperial politics. Thameur Mejri’s previous body of work, where his intellectual and artistic mission sought to criticize and deconstruct his oriental environment through occidental tools, has shifted contrapuntally. Disillusioned and disenchanted with the hegemonic occidental model¾ a sentiment triggered by the ongoing rationalization of dehumanizing acts¾ the artist relies on that very model’s parlance as to decolonize and deconstruct its defects and fissures. Fallen Archetypes is a series of several variations, as he terms it, from Mejri’s upcoming solo show. To this end, through this newest body of work, he examines what happens in the painting and through the painting, where indifference bids farewell, and affect becomes activated; it strikes back with force.

On planes of deepening reds and greens, smeared by gusts of diagonal lines, where blues are unusually threatening and hostile, the seemingly accidental is in fact intentional in its defiance. On certain canvases, hieroglyphs, motifs that are ritually superimposed in his work, spatter and cascade on restless fabrics that veil a kind of mental pentimenti. On other canvases, such as Fallen Structures, a rather reductive palette is employed, where torrential shuffled lines swiftly and explosively invade and disconcert the muted surfaces. Mejri’s impluse to amplify was followed by an intention to simplify. Yielding more value to the techniques, he states that, “the significance is dictated by the practice, design, materials, and my interaction with the formats”. It is precisely via this iconographic repetition and consistency where the encounter between the artist and his canvas lays, where all is marked by doses of intensity amidst the inherent fragility of his medium, namely charcoal. Simultaneously, the vigorousness of the fall is counterpoised by the frailty of anatomical forms that levitate and writhe, an invisible thread colliding vulnerability and violence. These silhouettes, or half-silhouettes, appear altogether upside down, upended, suspended in action, or collapsing, as if entering a chasm that seems to parasitize them.