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Fatima Hassan El Farouj, Jour de fete , 1969

Fatima Hassan El Farouj

Jour de fete , 1969
Oil on canvas
95hx135w cm
37.4h x 53.15w in
FHF-000002
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Through artistic eccentricity and polychromatic scenography, the Moroccan artist Fatima Hassan El Farouj animates her canvas by accessing and traversing her personalized universe. Since the 1960s, she has steadily forged...
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Through artistic eccentricity and polychromatic scenography, the Moroccan artist Fatima Hassan El Farouj animates her canvas by accessing and traversing her personalized universe. Since the 1960s, she has steadily forged a practice that reflects her distinct sensibility, both in her thematic concerns and her visual language. Her early fascination with painting, discovered alongside her husband, marked a shift from the tactile traditions of embroidery, sewing, and henna art toward the freedom of the pictorial field. This emancipation allowed El Farouj to construct and assemble compositions character by character, motif by motif, colour by colour, through a process of meticulous layering and rhythmic, abundant stratification.

Her representations of hybridized and reinvented symbols, motifs, and figures, both human and animal, testify to the dexterity of her visual memory and to her connection to Moroccan iconography and Amazigh origins, through which she subverts Westernized modes of expression. Her refreshing approach to figurative-surrealism embraces a mutation of contextual and geometric abstractions, where her fluid curvilinear tracings and dense spatial saturation lend an almost musical resonance to the scenes.


In Jour de fête, one of her emblematic collective portraits of ceremonial acts, the artist draws on her background in embroidery and traditional crafts to imbue and populate the pictorial space with intricate pattern stratifications. The vigorousness of colour and the saturation of space emphasize a world that is both real and wondrous; a celebratory universe that El Farouj sought to translate visually and that Jour de fête brings to life with particular exuberance. The painting portrays a lively gathering animated by figures in constant movement and interaction, their bodies are each given enough space within a dense, pulsating composition. Each figure is bathed in intricately patterned garments that echo the artist’s love of textile traditions and geometric ornamentation. Their gestures are excited, rhythmic, and expressive, evoking the atmosphere of a traditional ceremony unfolding as a communal festivity. Music, dance, and conversation interlace throughout the scene, while stylized architectural forms evoke a bustling space immersed in celebration. Through its vibrant, layered motifs, and choreographed spatial fullness, the work captures the celebratory moment as a radiant convergence of cultural heritage, ritual, and collective delight.

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TUNIS

32 Rue Ibn Nafis
Z.I. Kheireddine, La Goulette, 2015
Tunisia

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