WITH A UNIQUE APPROACH AND A FIERY PASSION
Abdessalem Elfaleh is an artist who deals with several social or societal issues, ranging from religion to sexuality and politics, his approach is often critical.
He often seeks his inspiration in the socio-cultural and socio-economic conflicts rooted in the interior of Tunisia and essentially in the region of "Sidi Bouzid" from which he originates and which remains a symbolic place, in the sense that it was the focus from which the first flame of the Arab revolutions started.
From this place-symbol to which the artist clings, various expressive forms stretch out, breaking the silence in an imaginary aura of deafening noise.
His artistic practice draws up the trial of a confused and double reality. Drawing on an imagination drawn from a bubbling source, the artist remains problematic and problematises an experience with confusing contours. The question that he tirelessly deals with in his work revolves around the Muslim prayer rug. A central and centralized core essentially on the Arab-Muslim iconography that he questions and puts it in perspective with the question of Islam in Arab societies.
In a practitioner approach, he tries to confront two states of being, namely the thing in itself or the object and the drawing, trying to problematise the encounter between the abandoned object and the individual and/or collective imagination. In this impulse, the artist plays on the mutation of his pictorial space, thwarting linguistic symbolism towards a dialectical aesthetic experience in which irony prevails.
"By diverting the primary function of the shoes towards a plastic function, by using them as a support for my artistic practice, it is a whole meaning that I wanted to put in place. The field of meaning that encircles these shoes had led me to set up a system of meaning that refers only to the problematic dimension. A metaphor that throws us into the repetitive movements of everyday life, such as walking, stopping, praying... etc. This space-symbol carries within it the memory of an experience, of a passage from a state of the world. It lifts the time of the object and engages it in an unfinished temporality. Becoming the support of a face or a look, they become eternal in their own memory. This work remains the synthesis of a dialectical approach that refuses to subjugate man and engages him in a reflexive and conscientious approach to his routine everyday life, devoid of meaning".