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For El Kamel, “The function of a work of art is first of all in itself. If we consider Art as a simple decoration - which is now outdated - we deny its true function which is to live in the one who looks at it and to impose the problems it raises on him.” (2). This series of drawings made in 1987 does not fail to establish more firmly this discourse where the line tends towards nothing but itself. Although untitled, these works nevertheless follow the path of his Transfigurations, his explorations beyond the figure. And this is the demand of El Kamel's art: to undo the mechanics of the hand, the tropism of the line that appears and to rediscover the naked pictorial fact, the raw plasticity. This search leads him to break the frame of the doing and to probe a painting that is being experimented while reaching its completion. Thus, a left hand, still authentic, was tearing off the tools with the right hand, too educated, to find a drawing without a purpose, to restore a line without horizons. “I wanted, he says in 1985, at a certain point, to get rid of all my assets. I noticed that they had become disturbing. I'm talking about my academic background in the 1960s and 1970s. (...) I even had to stop working with my right hand, even if I wasn't left-handed, to break with a certain skill”.
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Defeat of a too skillful hand and also defeat of a painting system. To the line that joins, Rafik El Kamel opposes a line that divides. A counter-line which is already the first to be installed in the work that is being done. In a set of stencils always reinvented, a skeleton, in reserve, comes to disarticulate the jets of a gesture, the vehemence of a brush. Inked masses are born, possessed by a body in the act of taking possession of its surfaces. After a first eminently pictorial time, where the painter brings and roots his body, the hand that traces cadences another measure. That of giving another body to these living masses of the impulses of the gesture.
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A transubstantiation takes shape and a graphic body takes its place and comes to life in the body of the work.
A graphic body inhabiting the paper with its black contours and outbursts, living with its moods breathed in by the pulses traced in red and yellow. And this is the demand of El Kamel's art: to undo the mechanics of the hand, the tropism of the line that appears and to rediscover the naked pictorial fact, the raw plasticity. This search leads him to break the frame of the doing
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and to probe a painting that is being experimented while reaching its completion. Thus, a left hand, still authentic, was tearing off the tools with the right hand, too educated, to find a drawing without a purpose, to restore a line without horizons. “I wanted, he says in 1985, at a certain point, to get rid of all my assets. I noticed that they had become disturbing. I'm talking about my academic background in the 1960s and 1970s. (...) I even had to stop working with my right hand, even if I wasn't left-handed, to break with a certain skill”.
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Rafik El Kamel
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