Nabil El Makhloufi
My new works address once again the central questions of identity, belonging, origin, but also the relationship between the individual and the community, and the fragility of human existence. As a painter, I aspire to express ambivalence, ambiguity and complexity through a pictorial language that is both poetic and realistic. My experiences of the in-between are expressed through overpainting, retraction and the tension between formulated and fragmentary image parts. The motifs, people and spaces depicted draw on my pictorial memory of my native Moroccan culture and, at the same time, on distance from it, fragmentary recollection, becoming a foreigner and reflection in the mirror of new experiences.