Untitled 2: Group Show

16 May - 31 July 2022

is a group exhibition organised by Selma Feriani Gallery in which history, historical locations, urban landscapes and traces of civilisations will be at the heart of the show.
The exhibition features the work of Rafik el Kamel, an artist who took a critical look at the École de Tunis and split from the practice of figuration that defined it. His painting experience translates from defined and defining forms to entirely abstract forms through coloured and layered brushstrokes, giving depths to the paintings.
From the defined flat colored forms and limitless spaces of Rafik el Kamel, we move to the represented landscapes yet imaginative spaces within the works of Fares Thabet and Yann Lacroix.
By noticing urban features and architecture, Yann Lacroix blends his landscapes and architectural projections merging the “in between” heterogenic characters together, to illustrate an idea of a moment of a contemplation of an image that have left an impression. In the same vein, Thabet takes the root of his paintings based on postcards or vinyl cases he may have come across while shopping in the flea market, which he interprets and translates into colors as a language and a way to decode the represented elements.
The impression is printed in the artist's imagination and its many forms of representation go further than the empirical experience and is concrete by what remains in their mind and beyond. This is clear in the photographic eye of Jellel Gasteli and his photographic travel journal that capture his findings in the landscapes he encountered, depicting their loud and clear characters during his tours, witnessing moments and unveiling in one’s visual experience and encounters.
The work of Malek Gnaoui reveals the remains of everyday materials and the present archeology that his artwork depicts using replicas of the civilisation of Carthage found at the heart of museum gift shops. It reveals in a sense that the remains of the memory of a glorified history could be a take-away souvenir, displayed as a symbol of the end of an empire that still claims glory with a golden skin but a weakened history.
Catalina Swinburn raises the limits between reconstructing social practices and figures through tangible objects, while creating detours in architectural plans through folds; as if dismantling what should have been constructed or what is meant to be established is a metaphor of the being and becoming of these defined lines meant to trace and define urban spaces.
In the same vein, Thameur Mejri undergoes his painting with a more deconstructed approach, giving a deconstructed anatomy of socio-political states and crises that the world has been experiencing in an overview of multifaced realities in complete chaos and deconstruction.
Within this complexity, the works give an outlook on current and previous times, witnessing landscapes and experiences, and also mirroring socio-political features of different decades translated through lines, colours, painting, photography and installations. Untitled 2 features the artists Malek Gnaoui, Fares Thabet, Catalina Swinburn, Yann Lacroix, Jellel Gasteli, Rafik el Kamel and Thameur Mejri.