Thameur Mejri’s practice inhabits the interstice of the traditional and contemporary, where the old and the new collide.

Rummaging across the fundamentals of his discipline, his precedents and their underlying practices, Mejri engages in a painstaking investigation about traditional techniques, particularly academic and anatomic drawings through a contemporary lens. In front of Mejri’s lofty piece Dawn of Men, impelled to plumb the depth of its compounded enigmas, at times we gaze at its upper edges, in anticipation of an impending fall, whilst at other times we observe as it has already unfolded. The artist illustrates a liminal phase where he resides, on both a personal and a cultural level, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. He seeks to reinterpret the language of paint, by means of mutiny and dissent, as to translate the immediacy of his tragic vision of the world. The brushwork is all the more important as his colour palette denotes more than a mere reminiscence of atmosphere; the aggregation of hues and elements signals an eruption, a solfatara, a muffled noise, a cacophony, a cue for imminent catastrophe and hostility, potentially echoing an ecological stance, as the artist ponders whether or not we are in harmony with our environments.