PIASA presents, in partnership with ASPIRE auction house, a sale of African Contemporary Art on 14 February 2020 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Slimen El Kamel was born in 1983 in Mazouna in the Sidi Bouzid region in Tunisia. Nourished within popular narrative, his childhood was also shaped by the imagination of the rural environment where the tradition of folk tale and poetry flourished.
His studies at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Tunis allowed him to crystallize this literary and intellectual heritage in a singular plastic practice. A practice whose genesis opens up through writing and draws its resources from its texts, sometimes poetic or literary, sometimes memorial or improvised. Daily scriptural exercise, as much as it circumscribes, expands the horizons of his plastic universe.
Not far from free figuration, the artist questions the relationship between the real and the imaginary through the dramatisation of the constellated image. The figure of a reality levitates in the space of an imagination and of proliferating profusion where a transfiguration of the social and popular fact is played out in a surreal vision.
Images of memory, images of reality taken from everyday media intersect in a pictorial field where, on the surface of a picture, the rustling of a dialogue begins without end, not for the telling of a fact, but for a feast of stories.
Christophe Person Head of Contemporary African Art, PIASA
