Jaber El Mahjoub

Jaber El Mahjoub is a Tunisian artist born in 1938 in M'Saken, in a family of shepherds. His childhood is marked by the disappearance of his mother when he is only six years old. His sister accompanies him in his education and allows him, in particular, to learn to read and write. In 1958, he leaves Tunisia to settle in Marseille, where he works as a baker. Two years later, he joins Paris. Talented with his hands and his voice, Jaber El Mahjoub progressively develops a singular artistic practice, while composing, writing, and performing songs. He notably recorded two 45 rpm records at Pathé Marconi.

Self-taught and deeply instinctive, Jaber El Mahjoub develops an artistic universe situated at the border of raw art, naive art, and brut art. His work includes both painting and drawing as well as sculpture. He notably creates works in papier-mâché which he gives shapes inspired by the animal and plant world: birds, fish, or flowers appear in an imaginary world populated by figures, characters, and symbols. His experience as a baker also nourishes his way of working with material: he first shapes his forms with his hands before baking them, in a process that brings the artistic gesture closer to that he used in his trade.

Jaber El Mahjoub's painting is characterized by bright colors, strong black outlines, and great graphic spontaneity. His compositions associate human figures, animals, flowers, and signs in scenes where the real and the imaginary meet. His works on paper and canvas, made notably with gouache and acrylic, attest to a free, instinctive, and immediately recognizable pictorial language. The figures can be distorted, stylized or accompanied by symbolic elements, giving his compositions a dimension that is at once naive, expressive, and poetic.

His artistic journey takes an international dimension when an American collector discovers his work and takes it to the United States. Jaber El Mahjoub develops his career there and exhibits notably in San Francisco, where his universe meets the public interest associated with the "flower-power" culture. Back in Paris, he exhibited in 1977 at the American Center of Artists. His work was then presented in different exhibitions and joined collections of museums dedicated to raw art and outsider art. He also received the first painting prize at the Plainfield Art Festival, among 800 candidates.

Through a deeply personal work, Jaber El Mahjoub transforms his life journey, his experiences, and his imagination into an artistic language free of any academic convention. His paintings, drawings, and sculptures are distinguished by their spontaneity, chromatic richness, and imaginary bestiary. A singular figure of raw art and outsider art, he develops a work in which the apparent simplicity of the line gives way to a rich symbolic universe, populated by characters, animals, and forms from his imagination.