TAREK BEN YAKHLEF

MASK 2.0


GALERIE CAROLE KVASNEVSKI


06-11 NOVEMBER 2017

Tarek continues the exploration of the "Mask" that he initiated in 2010. In 2016, after his return from a stay in Cameroon, he customised masks as well as paintings.


For the gallery's new artistic season, he proposes a 2.0 version of the fusion between ancestral tribalism and modernity. For this exhibition, Tarek synthesizes more than 10 years of research through his GEOMETRIK pathways that we find in his works for several years. He associates the universality of the mask and questions us: is it only a free form of figurative naturalism, a symbolic object? A decorative object? Undoubtedly a plastic creation that Tarek transforms into a pictorial work on canvas or wall, thus echoing cave art. Perhaps his research refers to the urban artist, hidden and anonymous. 



The mask becomes his signature as a tag can.


William Buller Fagg, historian of Black African arts and specialist in Nigeria, said of the mask: "All objects to which the name 'mask' must be attributed can be defined in two words: they mask. This means that they hide or suppress identity. But if the mask hides, then what does it reveal in return?

Share by: