Jamel Barbach
° 1989
Lives and works in Liège
“Ever since I graduated from the Académie des Beaux Arts de Liège in 2015, my work is constantly evolving. The basis of my thinking was that “everything is a pretext for painting”, the subject was of little importance. Painting was at the heart of my work, and the subject was just a pretext for my painting to exist, for me to exist.
It’s April 2022 as I write this, The sky is gray, as it has been for months now, and the absence of light and color is making itself felt. This certainly explains the need to use so much of it in my paintings. Contradiction and humor are an integral part of my work. For me, nothing is more powerful than combining and to juxtapose opposing elements, creating a multitude of possibilities for reading the work.
My “voyeurism” could be described as “voyeurism”. naughty”, with its predominant pink, is illustrated by my series on home interiors. It’s as if I’m looking into someone’s home without having been invited, without having been asked. The interiors are always deserted, depopulated, but I add objects or images from my personal collection to make the place my own, for the duration of a painting.
Recently, I’ve been having a lot of fun “taking things out” of the image. The classic, logical scheme is to look at a real object, a landscape or a still life and then paint it. But the reverse is so much more pleasurable. Creating an imaginary composition and then “pulling an object” out of that image reverses the academic creative process. The object removed from the image maintains a link with the painting, but no longer as if it were at its service, but rather as its equal. In the book “The Open Work” by Umberto Eco, a passage spoke to me:
Going deeper into a problem is not the same as solving it.
simply to establish a sort of repertory of questions
to which only collective, interdisciplinary research
be in a position to provide an answer.
This passage sums up my personal thoughts and my need to work in series. The “problem” is the subject, and serial work is the multitude of possible answers on my scale. The work I’m developing during my residency at Ravi is based on this theme and sums up my thinking on serial work. The subject is “the Vase”, enriched in different ways: by from representations of the Ming Empire, to images of trendy parties, or even tennis (a sport I don’t play at all)… This gives a multitude of ways of reading the work. The degree of reading will be different for each person, depending on their personal history, experience, level of knowledge or culture. Feel free to take my paintings at face value or at face value.”