Tarik Chebli | Biography

Tarik Chebli is a French painter born in Nantes in 1993. He has lived and worked between Paris and Berlin since obtaining his master’s degree in plastic arts research at the University of Rennes 2 in 2018. He is represented and exhibited by the Akié Arichi gallery in Paris since 2017. In Middle -East Tarik Chebli is represented by Emergeast since 2020 and in China by Yu-Dian gallery since 2021.

Statment

I paint a plant and animal world, often with aquatic elements like ponds or waterfalls or underwater worlds. These elements swarm on a very textured surface where the material is highlighted. I paint hidden natures, distant, virgin lands, which do not appear on any map. I don’t want my paintings to refer to our daily lives. Thus, I do not paint Man or his constructions.

When I was little, when I had “crises”, I ran away as quickly as possible and it was always near a little piece of nature that I stopped, exhausted. Problems, worries, human contingencies seem so insignificant when you observe a colony of ants. I could have made mine the sentence of Claude Monet: “It is a trade that I learned in my youth… when I was unhappy… I perhaps owe to the flowers to have been a painter”.

Nature has its own life, it constantly evolves autonomously in parallel with the world of men. Diving into his world is like studying something else, something higher. It is a break, a rest, a refuge from our life in society. These places that I paint are fantasies, hopes of earthly paradises where everything would be fine, far from men.

From the age of 16, I worked on a construction site of a house with my father. This is where I took a liking to materials and accidents. Indeed, these places are full of beauty. The windows of a painted room revealing the movements of a roller of paint, the fingerprints in the coating, the incredible colors of the paint rotting because the bucket was not properly closed refer to different retinal sensations . Moreover, the fact of manipulating these materials and substances leaves traces, small accidents that I have always found aesthetic and attractive.

Following the construction experience, I was not afraid to try all kinds of experiments by pouring huge quantities of different materials such as cement or plaster, then mixing, crushing, burning, tearing, drown the paint. But abstraction alone tends to bore me and with the beauty of the accidents of materials, I needed nature as well. In the abstraction that my various operations produced I saw plant forms appear through pareidolia. This is what Françis Bacon called “the diagram”. In this way, I painted from chaos to form by collecting all the aesthetic accidents on the way and by setting up a saturation of material and scrapings of different textures to gradually move towards figuration, in this case a nature distant, dreamed and fantasized. It’s like gradually extracting a space and organic forms from a chaos of acrylic matter.

I thus create my ecosystems, chaotic in appearance but ultimately balanced through the composition of the image. I alternate on the same painting instinctual phases with concerted phases with figurative intention, sometimes for months or even years. The different ways of painting will thus mix, feed each other. We will be able to see elements made in a fraction of a second in a violent and spontaneous way which adjoin elements made with a brush, in a longer time, with precision and delicacy. Figurative elements convey meaning to abstract elements. From then on, a scraping or an agglomeration of paint will make you think of vegetation if a butterfly comes to rest on it. Conversely, the abstract elements transmit to the figurative elements the retinal sensations that they provoke in the viewer. This is due to the force of the transcribed gesture, to their colors, to their shapes and to their strange materialities. Some creatures are hidden, partially figured, and can only be spotted after more or less long observation. It brings mystery to the picture. The hints of images, the forms that will be, or will be, depending on the state of mind of the viewer.

My painting oscillates between the pleasure of manipulating materials and that of reproducing figures, I seek a certain beauty, that of tensions, discordances, that of acrylic paint, plastic that has become an organic substance.

Bio

Tarik Chebli is a French painter born in 1993 in Nantes, France to an Algerian father and a French mother. Very young he was passionate about drawing and at 11 he took watercolor lessons.

From the age of 16, Tarik began working on a construction site with his father. It was about finishing the construction of a house. It is in contact with all these substances and traces of constructions that Tarik takes a liking to the manipulation of materials and pictorial accidents.

Even before finishing his Master’s degree in Plastic Arts research at the University of Rennes2 in 2017, Tarik exhibited for the first time in Paris at the Akié Arichi gallery. He has since been represented by this gallery and will exhibit there 6 times, including once as a duo with his former painting teacher and mentor Denis Orhant in 2020 and once in a solo exhibition in 2022.

Upon graduation, Tarik moved to Berlin for 3 years. He paints every day and tries to live fully from his painting. In 2018 he exhibited in Berlin during the group exhibition Enter Art Foundation.

Back in France in 2021, he works closely with the online gallery Emergeast, whose main clientele is located in the Middle East. He quickly became one of their major artists and began to earn a living through the sale of his paintings. In 2022, he has a solo exhibition at the London May Fair with Emergeast.

In China Tarik has been represented by Yu-Dian Gallery since 2021.

About Tarik Chebli’s paintings

In the paintings of Tarik Chebli there are animals – butterflies, fish, birds, and a few monkeys. There are also plants – wild grasses, hard plants, and flowers.
All this swarming in the paint thickness, in the impasto, the chaos of spots, and the polychrome marbling. Animal and vegetation arise from those produced by various random operations: jets of more or less fluid substances, agglomerations of thick pastes, intrusions of scraped traces, rubbed. At first glance, the painting can appear as the result of a jouissifying exercise. An exercise of triturating colored substances to see involuntary forms, potentially flowers or birds. However, the formation of this living world does not consist only to convert matter’s accident into shape: some fish, some birds, some flower’s corollas have been consciously drawn and colored, plated on the surface in a sort of indifference to irregularities of the support which welcomes them.
This delicate and candid manner counteracts the confidence that this painting to seems to accord the effect of an impulsive handling of materials. And it is an analogous part played by elements of another type: impastos and fluid mixtures which have not become animal or plant, which have not acquired the status of namable forms and which remain masses heavy to saturated shade, fogged and pale areas, as if to break the painting in its excesses of lyricism.
In the paintings of Tarik Chebli there are therefore tensions, discordances. This painting which balances between a pleasure of materiality and an application to reproduce figures is equivocal. It seems to express an animal and vegetable vitality as a seizure on the spot; and also, a saturated space, a world too full, buzzing, stifling, as if this idea of nature was a phantasmatic construction, the product of distant images and memories.

Education

2012-2018 Master in plastic art research
Rennes, France Université Rennes2

2011-2012 Applied Arts Upgrade
Nantes, France École Pivaut

2011 General baccalaureate Economic and social series
Nantes, France Lycée Notre Dame

Price

2023 FOA Volume 17

2015 First price, Crous Bretagne painting contest
2015 Second price, Beaux-arts contest

Exhibitions

Beijing art fair

Group show with YuDian Gallery,

April 2023.

Jeunes Pousses

Group show with Quand les fleurs nous sauvent,

Galerie 5 rue Jacques Calot, Paris, mai 2023.

Euphoric Nature

solo show with Emergeast,

12 Hay hill, Mayfair, London on october 2022.

Rakuen

Solo show at Galerie Akié Arichi

26 re Keller, Paris, mai 2022.

Extatic Nature

Solo virtual exhibition with Emergeast

March april .2021.

Salon International du Livre rare

Group artist book exhibition

Grand Palais, Paris, France, september 2020.

Eden

2 artists exhibition with my former painting teatcher at the university.

Galerie Akié Arichi, Paris, France, september 2020.

Jeunes artistes émergents III

Group exhibition at Galerie Akié Arichi,

Paris, France, june 2019.

Enter Art Foundation

Group exhibition at Gerichtshöfe

Wedding, Berlin, Allemagne. , September 2018.

Jeunes artistes émergents II

Group exhibition at Galerie Akié Arichi,

Paris, France, mai-juin 2018.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Group exhibition at Galerie Arts et Essais,

Rennes, France, septembre 2017.

Jeunes artistes émergents I

Galerie Akié Arichi, Paris, France

Group exhibition, mai-juin 2017.

Hibiscus

Group exhibition at Galerie Arts et Essais,

Rennes, France, mai 2017.

Born in Nantes, France on September 18, 1993.