ENGRAVINGS | GRAVURES: GOUIDER TRIKI SOLO EXHIBITION | Selection from Le Violon Bleu Collection

Gouider Triki - Engravings

This exhibition presents a series of engravings by the Tunisian artist Gouider Triki, first and exclusively shown at L’Institut du Monde Arabe in 1992, as part of his exhibition “Gravures - Peintures”. Trained both as a painter and an engraver, his compositions tame chaos into fecund, almost theatrical, arrangements. His work presents an accumulation of symbols and forms, building an iconography that remains unmistakably distinctive.

Between 1966 and 1971, Triki studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, where he frequented the studios of various artists, including Khelifa Cheltout, before moving on to the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It was there that engraving became central to his artistic training. Through the studios of Jacques Lagrange, Lucien Coutaud, and Bertrand Dorny, Triki honed his technique and graphic style. The decade from 1971 to 1980 was elemental in constructing a visual vocabulary that would become the alphabet of his imagination. Tunisian writer Zoubeïr Lasram,in the catalogue dedicated to the L’Institut du Monde Arabe exhibition, reflects on Triki’s ultimate retreat into the embrace of nature in his native town, Lezdine. He writes that Triki “contemplates with equal love the sprouting of seeds through the furrows and the emergence of signs on the surface of the canvas. The artist is one, and can only attain his fullness by achieving an osmosis with nature itself”.[1] This very alphabet of forms arranges itself “into infinite syntactic constellations…through their secret combinations”. Stepping out of a fog that envelops and absorbs them, his protagonists capture what the French art historian Yves Bonnefoy describes as the “absolute that in the meadow trembles among the shadows” (cet absolut, qui vibre parmi le pré parmi les ombres).[2] The real, that which is ultimately unseizable, unlocatable, remains present here. It is not swept away for the mythical, but rather ebbs and flows continuously. What we encounter is something quite elemental to his pulsating, tranquil earth, where repetition contains rather than scatters, within the plenitude of signs, those that are cascading, but not in unsettling disorientation.

French art critic Gilbert Lascault draws the analogy that, if one looks attentively, just as Gouider Triki does when he draws his native village, then the entire village becomes the totality of the world. “For Triki, one must be at the heart of a village to grasp the universe. The vast resides within the small; the strange and the fantastic lie at the heart of the familiar. For him, nearness holds the key to dreaming of the distant”. He suggests that the village order, both unshakable and flexible, gives rise to rhythms, movements forming friezes, circles, spirals, and even the most scattered sounds resolve into harmony.[3] Triki’s drawings illuminate this totality, where hush and resonance, voices, chants, and footsteps all take part in composing a world. Each element plays a role, ascending or descending in relation to the others. Human figures, animals, trees, suns, and mythical beings swarm across his works. These signs multiply, intersect, stir and pulse in every direction. They are never still. His vision knits them together into entangled chronicles, where they can exist inextricably, forming molecular-like traces just as much as they can stand individually. At times, they are granted a degree of liberty to separate themselves, momentarily solitary, to summon the courage to occupy a single space within a larger scene. In this series, there is a tracing of the arc of his cartography, etched onto the surface of the plate: landscapes of his village, and ultimately of the world, seen from above, as if through the eyes of a bird, while other pieces capture a close-up of individual marks. We are introduced to central characters who inhabit the edges and curves of his multiplying compositions. Paths, routes, and passages encompass an ever-shifting geography and architecture that invite us to lean in, to cross a threshold between movement and pause, between journey and arrival, in order to apprehend what may lie at the very edge of the world.