Les Nuits de Shéhérazade
As soon as the confinement began, the artist began a new series, consisting of about thirty canvases, entitled The Confined Nights of Scheherazade. For this one, Ilyes chose to pay homage to the raw artist Othmane Khadhraoui, drawing inspiration from his work, which is characterized by cultural popularity and a pronounced first degree. Othmane's work was composed of a textual header, describing with simple expressions, sometimes due to spelling mistakes, a colorful and often satirical scene of daily life. Such is the series of the Confined Nights of Scheherazade; the artist integrates pictorial sayings and kitsch and folk songs, always with humor and related to the confinement and behavior of the citizen in such a situation. A way for Ilyes Messaoudi to propose a didactic and entertaining work in order to democratize art and to make it travel towards a public without apriorities and far from any elitism.
About Ilyes Messaoudi :
lyes Messaoudi is a young visual artist born in Tunis in 1990 who works through time, at the crossroads of tradition and contemporaneity. The artist plays insolently with the notion of identity mergers and confusions, which a cultural revolution has exalted. With his painting, his sequins and his collages, he becomes a griot of the current era, an enchanter as naive as he is ironic. So many contrasts perceptible for so many materials to juxtapose and stories to tell: lightning and reflection, urgency and eternity, East and West?
For the past 3 years, Ilyes Messaoudi has taken up the challenge of creating 1001 canvases by revisiting The Thousand and One Nights in Tunisian Sauce: The Nights of Scheherazade. This adaptation allows the artist to explore a thousand and one taboos, a thousand and one doubts, a thousand and one emotions, which continually haunt us. Canvas after canvas, Ilyes tries to reach the apotheosis that the tale promises us.
