It may seem, at the first look, that the different shapes that are painted, drawn, scrawled, poured and even stuck (I think, particularly, of this floating electronic object which looks like an iPad) are stemming from an independent process.
Because they evoke, each, a technique which stands out as a full art. The Painting. The Drawing. The Collage (Sticking). Here, it’s not the case. The techniques serve themselves , they are linked to give rise to an ideological situation. The drawing is not the anteroom of the Painting, no more than the collage(sticking) is the one of Ready-made. Abolition of the hierarchy, the classic processes, now stereotypical.
The series of the Truisms is in the crossroads of the academicism and the modernism, better than that, the future. The technical mastery of Nidhal Chamekh serves him in his ideas, and vice versa. His technique, skillful and fine, is not his enemy, it’s his faithful ally, in the service of his thought.He handles the academicisms and the raw interventions as he makes have a dialogue between the mechanical and alive forms.
Everything is here questions of cold / warm, alive / stoical, traditional / innovator. And nevertheless, his work gives the feeling of a profound uniqueness. In spite of perspective lines and the shadows, academically put on the forms, there is in every painting, an intense sensation of flatness, of stake in the same plan.
The various elements interlace, and form an indestructible set but fragmentable. In his work, the past and the future interlace, and even copulate to embody his own concept. The feminine body, in the center of every composition, asserts this idea of birth. This body, that the volumes are clearly suggested, remains nevertheless terribly dry and hard, by the rigor of the lines. As a matter of fact, he is a matrix in the edge of the alive and the motionless.
Undoubtedly, this eternal story of contrast…
text by Réjane Allano
