NABIL SAOUABI (B.1972)

After studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Tunis, Nabil Saouabi successively obtained his master's degree there in 2002, specializing in engraving, which he later taught at the fine arts school, and his doctorate in 2013 in science and techniques of the arts.

For him, art is first and foremost a strong act of resistance and all-encompassing commitment. He is a multidisciplinary artist exploiting a whole range of mediums (painting, engraving, video, installation, etc.). Nevertheless, painting and engraving remain by far his preferred techniques, the ones he favors over all others. His artistic universe, inspired by media or cinematic images, oscillates between the political and the poetic. His characters, thrust into situations, are left to their own devices or trapped and suspended in a kind of dead time. It is a universe of ambiguity and uncertainty reflecting existential concerns, between two shores: collective mythology and personal mythology.

A passionate artist, he moves with agility and grace from one technique to another and from one process to another in a constantly renewed creative dynamic. He reconstructs a plastic universe that stages the relationship of human beings between the present and the eternal. These images, whether political, ethnic, social, or even cinematic, function as a matrix in his work. So many elements that allow for the establishment of an action of liberation of memories through a staging or scenography in a dramatic narration. Between sky and earth; between shadow and light, between the tragic and the comic, between heavy eternity and the unbearable lightness of being, the act of creation is drawn as the ultimate journey.

In 2000, he held his first solo exhibition and has since participated in numerous exhibitions in Tunisia and abroad such as Dak'Art, Beijing, and the 6th International Engraving Biennale of Île-de-France, as well as international art fairs including 1-54 Contemporary African Art in New York, Art Dubai, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, and Parallel Vienna. In 2014, the El Marsa gallery hosted his exhibition Sleeper(s) Awake, which reflects on the power of political images in a staging and mise en abyme that theatricalizes autobiographical painting, recounting the relationship between the painter and the world around him, particularly in his studio space.

His works are present in numerous private collections in Tunisia, Europe, and the Middle East, and also feature in the collections of the Tunisian Ministry of Culture.



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