If my photographic approach resulted in large format black and white silver prints, the transition to digital photography took place with the appropriation of color.
The vernacular wall suggests the frame, the material, the meaning, the light. The gesture of the anonymous painter on a wall from Tunis, Tangier, Marrakech, Cairo or elsewhere, brings back memories of Mark Rothko, Nicolas De Staël, Barnett Newman, Georg Baselitz, Cy Twombly, Juan Miro and many others, but I don't pretend to be a painter.
If we consider painting as an additive method whose artist's gesture consists in informing a neutral medium, or if we consider the blank page as the starting point for writing, for my part, I use photography as a subtractive abstraction operated from the real.
These fragments of walls on which the gaze can slide without paying them the slightest attention, give me an aesthetic emotion and offer me the pleasure of appropriating shapes, colors, unintentional and anonymous signs, which, once sublimated by large-format prints, take on the meaning that my own gaze attributes to them.
The shift from the vernacular or from the real to pictorial abstraction is a research in which I bring together on the same focus several beams of references to operate a switch in perception, using photography in a strict and unartificial way.
This aesthetic bias breaks with the schemes of recognition specific to photography, from which we generally expect the act of describing, depicting, representing, illustrating or capturing the picturesque.
I maintain this dialogue with architectures in which the layers of wall cladding are superimposed one on top of the other, new colors replace the previous shades, materials and colors metamorphose into witnesses to the passage of time.
These photographs materialize, at the same time, the transience of things in a stretching of the relationship to time and the instantaneity of a precise quality of light at a precise moment.
My studio is located in the streets of cities I love and I entrust to chance to surprise me or to offer me the content I am waiting for.
The Selma Feriani gallery presents the first milestone of a work in progress, the outcome of which will be the subject of an art book published by Lalla Hadria Editions. This book will bring together photographs that will be matched and echoed with passages from Abdelwahab Meddeb's unpublished notebooks on several cities in the Arab world and elsewhere.
Selma Feriani Gallery, Tunis
Translated by Narjes Torchani
