SUN RAYS AND TINY CUBES (2024)

Aymen Mbarki is a self-taught visual artist whose heightened awareness and sensibility to the poetics and politics of language and mythologies infuse his practice. His graphically minimal compositions and painterly outlines straddle across figurative, phonetic and asemic abstractions and capture the essence of spontaneous and intimate human gesture. As early as the age of 5, when Mbarki came across small posters of a printed copy of the work “Saturn Devouring his Son” by the Spanish painter and engraver Goya, a curious shift occurred whereby this encounter strongly and radically marked him and influenced his approach to art.

Mbarki proposes in his newest series of drawings an expansive dialogue between material and movement, and pattern and experimentation. Old paper recovered from the Medina of Tunis serves as his foundation, weathered and worn by the stains of time and humidity. In his upcoming solo exhibition entitled Sun Rays and Tiny Cubes unfolds an exploration of brushwork semblances and graphic lines that vacillate between tradition and modernity, amorphousness and lineation, where the viewer is ensconced in tranquil spaces for freedom and introspection.

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