Driven by a de-hierarchization of cultural categories, Nadjib Ben Ali’s painting explores the intersection between human emotion, dramatic archetypes and their 21st-century visual expressions. Tapping into both popular, counter-cultural references and the dramatic choreography of historical painting, his compositions draw inspiration from soccer, rap videos, horror films, and B-movie slashers.
Ben Ali selects and manipulates his images digitally using computer and smartphone screens as tools. Pushed to their chromatic and luminous extremes, these digital creations serve as starting points for his paintings. He reimagines and distorts epic and affective moments from soccer games, adding a visceral, dramatic intensity. Imbued with a universal sense of drama, his works echo themes from the arenas of ancient games to epic narratives harking back to Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. Soccer players are transformed into spectral figures, their faces fragmented into vibrant, acidic hues that evoke a haunting, sepulchral quality—where sports imagery collides with the macabre world of horror films.
Figures are isolated, their facial features obscured by thick, solid colors, creating a sense of confinement and tension. Faces, dazed or taut with nervous energy, and bodies, slumped in exhaustion or contemplation, recall a vast iconographic tradition. These works span narratives from classical tragedies to the everyday struggles of existence, laced with a touch of absurdity—the hallmark of contemporary tragedy. His choice of counterbalanced titles underscores this complexity. In Ben Ali's paintings, whether referencing rap videos, monstrous horror film imagery, or fallen sports heroes, tragedy resides in subtle interstices, between the hyper-saturated colors and the raw emotional weight of the scenes. His art is a theatrical, almost apocalyptic playing out of human drama, where every element contributes to a vivid, tragic sensibility. ...
T H E P I L L was founded in 2016 by Suela J. Cennet in the historic peninsula of Istanbul, to operate as a global platform and mobile vessel for contemporary art, supporting artists through a dynamic of cosmopolitanism beyond the dialectics of center and periphery. Initially envisioned by its founder as a space for an aesthetic of friendship, the gallery's programming is strongly inspired by the history and ideas of utopia and dystopia in modernism, with a particular focus on displacement, diaspora, feminisms, and queer aesthetics as reflected in contemporary artistic practices. ...
