PARCOURS

Le Violon Bleu Gallery in Sidi Bou Saïd presents PARCOURS, a solo exhibition of paintings by the Tunisian artist Rafik El Kamel, from 8 November to 20 December 2026. El Kamel was born in Tunis in 1944 and died in 2021. The gallery has organised the show as a tribute to the painter, whom it calls its lifelong companion. It follows his work from expressive faces through street scenes to abstraction. The exhibition image is Untitled (1997), an acrylic on canvas 188 cm high.

The earliest group is the Fou rire series, a title the gallery translates as Burst of Laughter. Faces with wide open mouths come out of dark grounds. They are painted in ochre tones with sharp, cutting lines. A later group turns to the street. Figures in a greenish light are reduced to flat shapes that pass alongside buildings.

From there the figure gives way to colour and form. Upright structures and flat areas of powdery pink, ochre yellow and black hold the centre of the canvas. The paint is laid on thickly and scratched into. In the last works, cut-out shapes, prints and stencilled forms float on soft, cloudy grounds, with white silhouettes ringed in bright red.

El Kamel graduated from the fine arts school in Tunis in 1966 and trained at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. His teaching post at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Tunis ran from 1971 to 1998. Along with Hedi Turki and Edgard Naccache, he was one of the earliest Tunisian painters to work in abstraction. The gallery showed him in Transfiguration 1 (2009) and Transfiguration 2 (2014), and with Gouider Triki in Memories (2014). His work is held by the Barjeel Art Foundation, MACAAL in Marrakech and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.