Written by Layla Yakoub
Translated by Fadia Antar

Rafik El Kamel was born in 1944 in Tunis. He graduated from the Institut supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Tunis in 1966 and the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1970. El Kamel returned to Tunisia in 1971 and taught at his alma mater while building his artistic career.

The Tunisian art scene, in the 1960s, was dominated by the School of Tunis, an anti-colonial arts movement that drew from popular sources in an effort to develop an “authentically Tunisian” national art. El Kamel and many of his peers, known as the “Nouvelles Conceptions” (New Conceptions) generation, were alienated from this group by virtue of their European educations and rejected what they saw as the School’s insular emphasis on folklore. El Kamel went abroad to pursue more experimental art practices, traveling to Paris on a scholarship from the Tunisian Ministry of Culture in 1967 to join the Department of Monumental Art at the École des Arts Décoratifs. For the next four years, he fostered his intellect and art in Paris, frequenting the studio of Jacques Despierre. He also developed a passion for Picasso and met thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Alain Krivine, with whom he participated in the May 1968 movement.  

When El Kamel returned to Tunisia in 1971, he was eager to make his mark on the new Tunisian art scene. In 1976, he helped establish the IrtissemGallery, a space for artistic research and, according to its manifesto, “a meeting point of all tendencies whose essential purpose is to endow present Tunisia with specific and contemporary art.”  Irtissem held an essential place in Tunisian artistic production until its closing in 1982. El Kamel contributed to many different facets of Tunisian culture throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and his involvement in the arts was not limited to any one medium or sphere. For example, his relationship with director Fadhel Jaziri and the Théâtre Nouveaucollective heavily influenced the production of El Aouada, 1989, a play whose set was inspired by El Kamel’s Vapeurs(1986), a series of paintings of Tunisian bars.

In a context where figuration was the norm, El Kamel distinguished himself through abstraction. He chose to express himself through form and color, free from concerns of reproducing the tangible. For El Kamel, the elements of chance and intuition were central to the artistic process, as is seen in the variety of forms and haphazard compositions he created. Made with acrylic paint on canvas and later, collage, his gradient and, monochromatic abstractions are composed of peaceful and deep colors, sometimes populated by small units evocative of cellular organisms. Despite collage’s association with intuition and chance, it pulled El Kamel’s work towards figurative art.  The artist exhibited a memorable series of his collages at the Sidi Bou Said municipality gallery in 1984 titled La Kharja, named after a procession held in honor of a Sufi saint. 

It was thus in the mid-1980s that El Kamel adopted figuration. In 1986, barely a year after partaking in a group exhibition on abstraction, he exhibited new figurative works at the Gorgi Gallery. He never abandoned abstract art, but rather helped deconstruct the strict opposition between abstract and figurative categories. El Kamel appointed a central role to color and light effects in his new approach, which deemphasized the actual object of representation in favor of the structure and composition created by shadow and light. Repeated colorful depictions of the same subject in his series Fou Rire(1985), evoke the pop art portraits that made Andy Warhol’s career twenty years earlier.

By representing the real, El Kamel confronted the challenges and theoretical debates of his time: he deliberated on what to paint and how to paint as a Tunisian artist while drifting away from Orientalism, and avoiding a futile search for universality. El Kamel answered this debate by painting the contemporary portrait of his personal Tunisia; its streets rendered both historical and contemporary. His works portray quotidian scenes of leather jackets, floral skirts, and traditional headgear alongside table football players, partygoers, and shoe shiners. By transcending this binary without caricature, nostalgia, or over-intellectualization, El Kamel leaves a specific and striking trace in the history of modern Tunisian art.

Rafik El Kamel lives and works in Cape Bon, Tunisia.

Sources

Lasram, Zoubeïr. Rafik El Kamel. Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1992. 

Louati, Ali. L'aventure De L'art Moderne En Tunisie. Tunis: Simpact éditions, 1997.

"Rafik El Kamel." Répertoire Des Artistes Tunisiens. September 24, 2016. Accessed June 08, 2018. http://repertoire-artistestunisiens.com/rafik-el-kamel/.

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"معرض الفنان ا ربعة الكبار : الفن التونسي الحديث يفرق ب التجريد والتشخيص." Alhayat. October 6, 1999. Accessed October 30, 2017.http://daharchives.alhayat.com/issue_archive/Hayat INT/1999/10/6/معرض-الفنان -ا ربعة-الكبار-الفن-التونسي-الحديث- -يفرق-ب -التجريد-والتشخيص.html.