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Slimen El Kamel: The Art of Remembering What Never Was

Slimen El Kamel: The Art of Remembering What Never Was August 11, 2025Art Events, ParisOff

Slimen El Kamel — Where Memory Becomes Myth

Some artists paint what they see. Slimen El Kamel paints what the soul remembers.

Born in 1983 in Mazouna, Tunisia, his childhood was steeped in the music of language—stories told around kitchen tables, the lyrical cadence of poetry, the endless strands of oral tradition. This tapestry of words became his first palette, and to this day, every brushstroke carries the echo of a tale once spoken.

If his canvases feel like they belong to another realm, it’s because they do. El Kamel studied at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Tunis before earning his Master’s in Cultural Studies in 2010, but his true education began much earlier—in the fragments of collective memory and the dreamlike spaces between reality and fiction.

His works are lush with metaphors, populated by figures who seem to hover between existence and disappearance. They emerge from expanses of pigment like half-remembered characters from a dream—shaped as much by absence as by presence. There is a poetry to the way he blurs lines and dissolves forms, as though memory itself were smudging the edges.

El Kamel is not just a painter—he is a chronicler of sensations. Through an intricate language of signs and symbols, he maps an intimate world where reality is porous and imagination is law. His paintings ask you to slow down, to inhabit their atmosphere the way you might inhabit a story told by candlelight.

Over the years, his work has travelled far beyond Tunisia, gracing exhibitions in Paris, London, Dubai, Marrakech, and beyond. Whether hung in the hushed reverence of a gallery or alive in dialogue with contemporary cultural spaces, his paintings carry their own weather—humid with memory, electric with possibility.

To encounter a Slimen El Kamel painting is to step into a realm where time loosens its grip, and where myth, memory, and the sensual present moment exist on the same shimmering plane. It is art as an act of preservation, and as a quiet rebellion against forgetting.

Slimen El Kamel’s latest works can be discovered at Mariane Ibrahim,
18 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris.

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