Abdelaziz Gorgi

Private Collection, Tunisia (Acquired directly from the artist circa 1960-1969) 

Abedelaziz Gorgi was once described by Albert Memmi as a "plaidoyer pro domo." With the exception of a few years he spent in Paris mingling with the likes of Picasso, Zadkine, Soupault and Leiris, Gorgi remained close to his roots, and the golden triangle between Tunis, La Marsa and Sidi-Bou-Said. 

His oeuvre is a testament to a strong attachment to Tunisia, both in its form and practice.  As one of the founders and last president of the Ecole de Tunis, of whom he remained an active practicing artist alongside Jallal Ben Abdallah and Hedi Turki, Gorgi's paintings and tapestries are colourful, repeatedly featuring tokens such as 'chechias', the traditional Tunisian headgear or Chkoba, the traditional Tunisian card game, which both act to symbolize his personal background. Gorgi was also very active in encouraging the arts within his community, designing the first Tunisian postage stamp in 1956 and establishing the Tunis School of painting which he presided over until 1983. In 2000 his efforts were repaid when the Tunisian ministry of Culture announced that the country to be celebrating a ‘Gorgi Year’ of culture.

Whilst studying at the newly established Tunis School of Fine Arts, Gorgi discovered colour, the sort of colour that allowed him to engage with light in a totally unique and mesmerizing way, "I don't see the sky as you do," referring to a palette, albeit highly coloured, often softened by light. Although the existence of light implies shadow, Gorgi’s pictorial language has allowed colour to vibrate and dance through Tunisia’s limpid light.

In Chkoba Players: Ramadan Evening, Gorgi annuls all perspective allowing the grimacing characters to float in a dreamlike space. Executed circa 1960, in the aftermath of Tunisia’s 1956 independence, Chkoba Players stems from a  quasi-epiphanic  desire to engage with the the country’s  cultural heritage, and one which may have been eroded by French colonialism. An entire generation of Tunisians were rediscovering their heritage and and taking pride in their cultural signifiers, creating a true drive towards local iconography, and everyday life subject. Unlike Morocco and Algeria where artist were engaging in  abstract signs or calligraphic works, l’Ecole de Tunis was considerably  rooted in a desire to engage with popular local culture, but rather than pursing ways of endorsing "Arab-ness" or "Islam," it is a secular and given Bourguiba’s vision of a secular and united nation. With that in mind, Chkoba Players; Ramadan Evening sits at the zenith of his work: in that it beautifully incorporates the folkloric and free approach to painting, immortalizing daily Tunisian life, in lines of great purity.

Gorgi is above all an artist of drawing. The drawing is highly stylized, resulting in an outcome where characters become traceless archetypes rather than plausible portrait. The scenes are dreamt rather than lived, in the midst of disappearance, the artist was documenting the last breathe of a way of life at the dawn of modernity. An intrinsic part of cafes, family gatherings and Ramadan nights, the "Chkoba," derived from the sicilian Scoppa, is the most popular local game, and a signifier of society’s best Iftar during the month of Ramadan.