Elkemel Mabrouk
Bzow
Mabrouk El Kemel was born in Sidi Bouzid in 1980, after a master's degree in fine arts (sculpture specialty) obtained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nabeul, he participated in several group exhibitions in Tunisia and abroad.
-2010 - 2013 - 2016: Group exhibition at Palais Khayreddine Tunis.
-2018 -2019: Collective exhibition at the national library of Tunis.
-2019: Personal exhibition in Strasbourg, France. - 2019: chosen among the 18 finalists of the yicca art prize.
-2020: Annual exhibition of the Tunisian federation of plastic arts.
-2021: Collective exhibition "Advisory explicit art" in Tunis.
-2022: Personal exhibition at the Galerie Alexandre roubtzoff. Tunisia
-2024: Personal exhibition at the Alexandre Roubtzoff Gallery. Tunisia
2022: Personal exhibition at the Alexandre Roubtzoff Gallery. Tunisia
"Autoportrait", personal exhibition by Mabrouk Elkamel (Bzaow) at the Alexandre Roubtzoff gallery: Fragmentary work | The Tunisian Press
Mabrouk Elkamel, alias "Bzaow", offers an explosion of forms and organs through his works exhibited in "Autoportrait", title of his personal exhibition, held at the Alexandre Roubtzoff-La Marsa gallery until December 3, 2022. The galerie-espace d'enchères is celebrating its 8th anniversary this year.
Introductory Critical Notice:
Fragments of the arms of the legs of heads captured in an oblique section of reality, an oblique section of the microscope allows us to see the macro-world. Stuck in the filaments of the primordial substance, the forms take birth from the undifferentiated of an interstitial space to emancipate themselves in autonomous plots in a dance of lines and colors where lies a poetics of the fragment, fragments exploded in the totality, totality which is destined never to end, in perpetual becoming. But more fundamentally, what is played out in his paintings is the capture of a snapshot of the creative process, the representation of a moment that passes between power and act. The objects seem to be captured from their archetypal form. Neither completely abstract nor more defined, these are motifs that are constantly seeking each other in the mode of spontaneous generation, hence the Static / Dynamic dialectic which carries the work in its entirety. It is above all a cartography of the creative psyche made up of ephemeral archipelagos scattered on the surface of a shoreless and stormy ocean, the ocean of absolute Life. Fulgurating emanation in the magma of the over-framing, the objects and the bits of men and women that we see are called to disappear at the next moment to transform into other plastic forms according to the pictorial impulse. Birth and Death come together in the eternity of the present. No longer succession but simultaneity. Towards the end of his life Antonin Artaud called for the emergence of a body without organs, Mabrouk El Kemel gives us to see the aesthetic in action of what organs without a body could be. establishing the limit between the interior and exterior space in which the painting actualizes its virtual potentials with the pencil movements which become almost automatic.
By using coarse salt as a fixing element for these canvas-talismans of a different order. The artist here becomes an alchemist by giving ink the structure of salt crystals. It charges the peripheral gangue with a creative power from which scraps of world emerge. Great Work where black ink is transmitted.
Ahmed Ben Fraj