Galerie Claude Lemand

Chaouki CHOUKINI - Song of the Wood. Song of the World.
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Thierry Savatier, Art his­to­rian.

Chaouki Choukini’s sculp­tures bear wit­ness to his sin­gular aes­thetic. Abstract, they nev­er­the­less include some min­eral or bio­log­ical details, even anthro­po­mor­phic or that can be inter­preted as such (Liberté fauve I). His strange formal con­struc­tions some­times seem to defy the laws of bal­ance; they pre­sent unex­pected recesses or pro­jec­tions that plunge the viewer into an imag­i­nary that is both dream­like and all the more dis­turbing as the soft­ness of the impec­cably pol­ished sur­faces con­trasts with the some­times dark char­acter of the whole (Paysage au clair de lune, 1978; Lieu, 1978). When we know that the artist works with wood or stone in direct carving, we mea­sure his dex­terity in playing with mate­rial / light oppo­si­tions to make the most of them.

Spirituality and meta­physics mark the plas­ticity of his works, just as humanity per­me­ates them (Little Prince. Child of Gaza, 2010). However, the artist does not refrain from paying homage to the art of his pre­de­ces­sors, some­times with a cer­tain sur­re­alist humor (Hommage à Breughel, 2001) or an attrac­tion for tragic alle­gory, like this very totemic (Cheval de Guernica, wood, 2010; bronze, 2011) of which Picasso, no more than of the bull, did not reveal the secret sym­bolism, leaving the viewer his free inter­pre­ta­tion. The fig­ures of Chaouki Choukini, whether they recall land­scapes or even satel­lite views (Les Environs de Damas, 2012) in their hor­i­zon­tality or that they chal­lenge the sky in their ver­ti­cality (Li Bayrut, 2020), are striking with their min­i­malist aes­thetic, undoubt­edly inherited from his Japanese expe­ri­ence which came to sup­ple­ment his Eastern and Western sen­si­bil­i­ties.