Artist of our current exhibition “Welcome to a Land of Needs and Desires”
Karim Ghelloussi (1977, France), whose work eludes all classification, composes wood palimpsests, appropriating scraps and other mundane distressed fragments from the depths of his studio.
His meticulously crafted compositions in marquetry, with their artful play and vibration of colours and textures, the attention paid to lines, to perspective and to architectural patterns, reveal his increasingly marked fondness for painting. His materials-waste or relics are thus laid out, composed and edited – in an almost cinematographic sense – by the artist in order to remodel images of our time, which he combines into evocatively entitled series, such as “Ici comme ailleurs (Au Val D’argent)” (Here like elsewhere) or “Mémoire de la jungle” (Jungle memory). Often the result of national or international geopolitical news events resonating with micro-sites or events (high-rises on the elevated esplanade of Argenteuil, the uprise in Tebessa, Algeria, a speech by an indigenous South American chief, a popular gathering following the deaths of female farm workers in Tunisia), this precise iconographic selection has been found and borrowed from numerous contemporary media outlets. It embodies a testimonial and a commitment, in the light of the citizen-led and collective movements that unsettle our era.
