by Tarik Chebl
1 100,00 €
In Island Fragment, Tarik Chebli moves toward a more abstract and object-like language. Poured and accumulated paint creates a dense, topographical surface, where colour and material seem to settle into islands, channels, and geological formations.
Rather than depicting nature directly, the work approaches it through texture, mass, and viewpoint. Seen almost from above, the painting suggests a terrain in formation: part image, part relief, part imagined fragment of an ecological world.
This material intensity sits at the centre of Chebli’s practice, where nature becomes a way to explore paint as substance — layered, physical, and suggestive of mud, water, bark, vegetation, and shifting ground.
I paint a fantasized, idealized nature, free from human presence. This imagined world is both a space for formal exploration and a statement — a conscious refusal of anthropocentrism and the everyday. My practice draws on travels in Asia (China, Thailand, Indonesia) and a deep fascination with biodiversity and ecosystems, often inspired by wildlife documentaries.
Materiality is central to my work. I use paint in large quantities, engaging physically with the surface. Nature becomes an excuse for a sculptural approach: accumulations, textures, layers that evoke mud, bark, fluids, or dense vegetation. Relief often blurs the line between painting and low relief.
Within these thick pictorial masses, I return to more detailed, meticulous brushwork, revealing animals and plants from a dreamed world — birds and primates with unusual colors, creatures that seem to demand to be seen, painted, remembered.
In a world saturated with human images, I choose to look elsewhere: toward rare, sublime, sometimes endangered life forms. Painting nature becomes both an aesthetic pursuit and a gesture of resistance — a way of honoring what may soon disappear.
