LOBBY SECOND FLOOR
Nadjib Ben Ali, french artist Nadjib Ben Ali finds the raw material for his flamboyant paintings in football, rap videos and Hitchcock movies
Nadjib Ben Ali is a football fan. But you can’t really say he watches matches; rather, he dissects them, like a critic scrutinizing an Alfred Hitchcock movie shot by shot. When he sees a frame he likes he takes a screenshot of it, which he then stores in a database to rival the Cinémathèque française. “I’m a real image cannibal, hungry for shapes, colours and compositions.” Some remind him of the master of suspense, others of Michelangelo. Hands touching, a close up of the back of the neck, a wide shot of a crowd. Legs intertwined. Faces marked by failure or victory. Ben Ali then compiles and reproduces these scenes as drawings – the physical manifestation of a virtual fantasy. If necessary, he reframes them, the spontaneous line of the marker pen giving them (new) life. Then comes the moment when they are transposed into paintings.
“My goal has always been to reproduce a marker-pen line in my painting.” To this end he invents his own tools: paint pencils made from glue sticks into which he inserts synthetic fabric (a soccer jersey, for instance). “For me drawing is like learning a choreography, memorizing a gesture that I’ll reproduce later on canvas.” Plunging his DIY pencils into acrylic paint, he mixes the pigments to recreate the brilliance of the screen on which the image first appeared. If necessary, he adds a little glycerol, “for a brighter black in the eye.” When he paints, Ben Ali looks as much to his drawing (for the materiality of the line and the gesture) as to the original image (for the composition). “But painting always wins,” he concedes. “I can change a colour, even if it is not identical to the screenshot or drawing because the balance of the painting calls for it.” Which he sometimes does to the point of abstraction.
“I’m not interested in a particular soccer player but in professional soccer, the big sponsor ads, the spectators in the stadiums. I want to be in their place, I want it all to belong to me. I like the dramaturgy. Soccer players aren’t actors; they’re focused on the game and aren’t in control of their affects. Their weakness is exposed. I like this idea, them lying down, overwhelmed, wounded.”
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