Hatem Akrout is a painter of spring. But in the Jardins d'Hatem, spring is not, unlike what Botticelli showed us, a time of harmony and balance. Far from the Renaissance ideal, Hatem immerses us in a reality reduced to its most haphazard materiality, a place of incessant struggles and conflicts, where elemental components and forces, in a frenetic post-winter dance, collide, intermingle, invade each other, proliferate and swarm, degenerate, burst or explode, undergo millions of ridiculous combinations, and thus produce both the evil and the well-formed, and therefore the deformed, the formless or the conformist, for everything is possible in this vast and futile molecular agitation. Spring in these Darwinian gardens is, therefore, a more or less joyful disorder from which uncertain and unfinished figures emerge—tubers, fry, a frog still a tadpole, a chick, a rooster, an embryo or a fetus—perhaps in the process of completion, perhaps already inert and on the verge of disintegration.
Hatem Akrout - Les Jardins de Hatem (1) - Papier Marouflé sur Toile - Acrylique, Pastel Gras (Chassis) - 60x40x2 cm - 2013
