Born in Nantes in 1993, Tarik Chebli is a French and Algerian painter whose richly textured works explore an imagined, untouched nature. His tactile, almost sculptural approach to painting evokes organic matter — mud, bark, vegetation — and invites a deep sense of calm and well-being.

After completing a foundation in Applied Arts and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at Rennes 2 University, he began exhibiting in Paris, then lived and worked in Berlin for three years. His artistic practice has been shaped by travels across Peru, North Africa, and Asia — particularly Thailand, China, and Indonesia.

He has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, London (with Emergeast Gallery), and China (Yudian Gallery), where he also completed a three-month residency in summer 2025. Through Emergeast, his work has entered private collections in the Middle East.

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.