Karim Ghelloussi

Karim Ghelloussi works on the gap between reality and its representation, on the construction of an image by the appropriation of an object, a fragment of reality. He retrieves things from secondhand shops, and things discarded from his studio, and these form the basic vocabulary of his sculptures. In the series Etudes et chutes/Studies and Scraps, the objects chosen are knick-knacks and pieces of chinoiserie, belonging to the field of the lesser arts, and regarded as kitsch. They represent archetypes of a common imagination informed by cultural clichés. The back-and-forth process, to-ing and fro-ing between the obviousness of the materials and the symbolism of the form, is also at work in the large sculptures for which the apparent assemblage of scraps and waste from his studio makes it possible to re-create the artist's gestures. Translated by Simon Pleasance