Fallen Archetypes: Thameur Mejri solo exhibition

FALLEN ARCHETYPES

At times when Western settler-colonialism continues to exonerate itself from moral and political condemnation, when disfigurements of history are perpetuated, our consciousness is alarmed, imminently and triumphantly, to the perils and injustices of imperial politics. Thameur Mejri’s previous body of work, where his intellectual
and artistic mission sought to criticize and deconstruct his oriental environment through occidental tools, has shifted contrapuntally. Disillusioned and disenchanted with the hegemonic occidental model – a sentiment triggered by the ongoing rationalization of dehumanizing acts – the artist relies on that very model’s parlance as to decolonize and deconstruct its defects and fissures. Fallen Archetypes is a series of several variations, as he terms it, from Mejri’s upcoming solo show. To this end, through this newest body of work, he examines what happens in the painting and through the painting, where indifference bids farewell, and affect becomes activated; it strikes back with force.

Yet in this series, Mejri perceptively segues from collective consciousness towards a subjective terrain. Similar to the lot of his contemporaries, by bearing witness to watershed historical and civilizational sequences that have hitherto reshuffled the socio- political landscape, the artist resists the vis inertiae. The susceptibility to the latter is indefinitely negated. His faculties are invigorated, and so are his intellect and intuition, however retributive the undertaking might be. The succession of turbulent catastrophes and perpetual tribulations flicker, jolt and agonize his senses; a residuum whence he departs, metabolizes and, acutely, elucidates its emanations. Essentially, “the future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.

It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity”.1 How will Mejri, faced with the forecasted tremors, reconcile with the oxymoronic stylistic-versus-thematic ambivalences that beset him?

An intervention would thus entail a consensus, in so far as he would allow his academic visual retention to be harnessed to serve his ends.

Indeed, neither any physical nor epistemological impediments could frustrate the periodization of his solemn expression. Rummaging across the fundamentals of his discipline, his precedents and their underlying practices, he engages in a painstaking investigation about traditional techniques, particularly academic and anatomic drawings through a contemporary lens.

Combining a quasi-architectural as well as a philosophical logic, the exhibition addresses the notion of self-concept vis-à-vis the edifice of painting, discourse and power, alleging thereby his Foucauldian affinities.
For Mejri, self-determinism is an illusion; it remains a fatal figment. Awareness however, or the lack thereof, is a constant catalyst for his current process.

Beyond the methodically copious structures, a wound is laid bare, transparent for some, while, perhaps by means of transference, poignantly perceptible for others. It is all too reminiscent or symptomatic of this Barthes quote, “I keep the wound open. I feed it with other images, until another wound appears and produces a diversion”.2 Tumults are whispered. The mutism of a flat surface lurks behind voiced uproars.

In front of Mejri’s compositions, impelled to plumb the depth of their compounded enigmas, at times we gaze at the canvases’ upper edges, in anticipation of an impending fall, whilst at other times we observe as it has already unfolded. We stand as beholders, disarmed, ceded of our authority and poise, in front of what may have been consciously buried. We are indeed not immune to their spectrality. The densely packed paintings are in concordant engagement as they echo one another, albeit in confrontation ad infinitum. Revelations are lodged within the constellations of guideposts – elements that the optic cannot evade nor repel. On planes of deepening reds and greens, smeared by gusts of diagonal lines, where blues are unusually threatening and hostile, the seemingly accidental is in fact intentional in its defiance. On certain canvases, hieroglyphs, motifs that are ritually superimposed in his work, spatter and cascade on restless fabrics that veil a kind of mental pentimenti. On other canvases, such as Fallen Structures, a rather reductive palette is employed, where torrential shuffled lines swiftly and explosively invade and disconcert the muted surfaces.

Mejri’s impluse to amplify was followed by an intention to simplify. Yielding more value to the techniques, he states that, “the significance is dictated by the practice, design, materials, and my interaction with the formats”. It is precisely via this iconographic repetition and consistency where the encounter between the artist and his canvas lays, where all is marked by doses of intensity amidst the inherent fragility of his medium, namely charcoal. Simultaneously, the vigorousness of the fall is counterpoised by the frailty of anatomical forms that levitate and writhe, an invisible thread colliding vulnerability and violence. These silhouettes, or half- silhouettes, appear altogether upside down, upended, suspended in action, or collapsing, as if entering a chasm that seems to parasitize them.

The convulsions are protuberant. The gesticulations are portending. The appearance of threat is instantaneous. All is amplified.

The vaunted archetypal model, once venerated by Mejri, is presently a subject to cognitive destruction: an absolute downfall of its referent totems. Plainly or obliquely, repressively or manifestly, he virtualizes a mordant palinode that is inherently testimonial.

The artist illustrates a liminal phase where he resides, on both a personal and a cultural level, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.3

He seeks to reinterpret the language of paint, by means of mutiny and dissent, as to translate the immediacy of his tragic vision of the world. The brushwork is all the more important as his color palette denotes more than a mere reminiscence of atmosphere; the aggregation of hues and elements signals an eruption, a solfatara, a muffled noise, a cacophony, a cue for imminent catastrophe and hostility, potentially echoing an ecological stance, as Mejri ponders whether or not we are in harmony with our environments. Often defying gravity, the highly visible contours of his figures’ disassembled limbs, legs and hands, enhance Mejri’s lucid facture where the act of crucifixion is reinterpreted – hence sparking a dialogue with Grünewald for instance. The postures and scales are imperatively of direct significance for they serve as a coda to his open ended questioning on the alienation, fall and demise of Man. The violent motion overlaid on the canvas evidently bespeaks our current positions in the world, how we are in a state of constant menace, alerted, and in crisis.

Blurring the demarcation between abstraction and reality, externalizing oneself from the mechanisms of introjection, we are absorbed in quicksand-like surfaces, wrestling with our equilibria, as we are engulfed in a final catharsis.

Racha Khemiri .  Tunis, April 2024

3  Gramsci,Antonio.SelectionsfromthePrisonNotebooksofAntonioGramsci.