Publisher's Synopsis
Slimen El Kamel was born in 1983 in Mazouna in the region of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. Nourished by popular stories, his childhood was shaped by the imagination of the rural environment where the tradition of storytelling and popular poetry flourished. His studies at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Tunis allowed him to crystallize this literary and intellectual heritage into a singular plastic practice. A practice whose genesis opens through a writing and draws its resources in his texts, sometimes poetic or literary, sometimes memorial or improvised. The daily scriptural exercise, as much as it circumscribes, extends the horizons of his plastic universe. Not far from the free figuration, the artist questions the relation of the real and the imaginary by the dramatization of the constellated image. The figure of a reality levitates in the space of an imagination and a proliferating abundance where a transfiguration of the social and popular fact in a surrealist vision is played. Images of the memory, images of a reality taken on the supports of the everyday life cross in a pictorial field where, to flower of painting, the rustle of a dialogue begins without end, not for the account of a fact, but for a festival of the accounts.
