Hatem El-Mekki

Private Collection, Tunisia (acquired directly from the artist circa 1955) 

This work is in very good condition. There are some fine and unobtrusive fine cracks to the black pigment. The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate, with the overall tonality tending more towards a stronger terracotta hue in the original work.
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Born in 1918 in Jakarta, Hatem El-Mekki is hailed as one of the most important Tunisian artists. He is praised for his prolific body of work and diverse techniques which are undoubtedly a direct result of the exposure he received during the rule of the French protectorate in Carthage. As the son of a Tunisian expatriate father and an Indonesian mother of Chinese origins, El-Mekki spent his childhood in Bavaria in an environment filled with European and Asiatic artistic influences. He arrived in Tunis in 1924 where he studied at the Lycée Carnot. It was during these formative years that El-Mekki developed his Chinese aquarelle technique, despite not knowing of his Chinese heritage. In 1932 he organized his first group exhibition at the Claridge Art Gallery in Tunis. Soon after he obtained a scholarship and moved to Paris as an artist in residence at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts. During this period, he transitioned to a career in artistic illustration for magazines, the most well-known being Marianne.

After returning to Tunis at the beginning of the Second World War, El-Mekki held his first solo exhibition which was met with great success. His unique persepctive–a combination of Impressionist-inspired landscapes filled with tragic poverty–is the result of his formal artistic training and the psychological impact of the war on the artist. These influences in turn set his work apart from traditional Impressionism, and have led his style to be categorized as bold and aggressive. The artist settled definitively in Tunisia in 1951 where he started a series of large-scale paintings in Khaznadar College. El-Mekki is also well-known for a series of postal stamps he was commissioned to produce for the United Nations and a few other countries. 

Inspired by the end of colonial empires and the recent events of  the Tunisian and Algerian war, El-Mekki’s style became politically impregnated. He welcomed international exposure by taking part in worldwide exhibitions in Cairo, across the United States, Germany and Korea where he was honored for his work. Considered as an engaged artist, he refused to be involved in any one ideological movement, and resisted falling prey to radical thinking. He often said that he did not go to war to pretend otherwise with a pencil and a brush. His pieces may appear as a sudden outburst of irrepressible anger and rebellion, however, he never pretended to exorcise our fears and demons. Like his contemporaries, he simply related events that touched him with his own personal stroke, questioning the real physical harm that comes from war and exile. Gendarme Français Arretant un Patriote Tunisien is the perfect example of the artists strong political imprint, especially following the Tunisia Independence that started in 1952 and lasted up to 1956. This revolution led to a bloodbath in Tunisia and resulted to the end of French colonisation. In a single scene, Gendarme Français Arretant un Patriote Tunisien depicts the internal state of the artist and his compatriots,; conditioned by decades of occupation, war and internecine strife. Through this work, El-Mekki historicized loaded notions of identity and its ties to an ill-defined conception of homeland.  The mood is forlorn, heavy and insecure, represented by grey daubs scattered across a rust-coloured pallet, the canvas suffered the intensity of the artists strokes. Deeply disturbed by the reports of death in the media and his own eye witness accounts, the artist sought to represent the tragic reality and destruction of French colonisation and the tortures committed by French soldiers to the Tunisian people.