ABOUT
Mounir Chaïbi’s biography is as cluttered as her studio, all in tendrils, turns, and travels. The first, in 1967, separated him from his native Tunisian south and put him in the capital. Inside, outside the device, it is according to the time, but very quickly in the all terrain for ever mixed of art and education.
To the youngsters in galley, which he cares very early, he teaches the graph, the drawing.
In 1980, he takes them to Tuscany. Voyage founder. Italy becomes its third homeland. Since then, he has been staying there regularly, still dazzled today by the 1981 experience, where he attends a sculpture symposium for a month.
In turn, he bake with Carrara and alabaster, associates himself with the performances of his new Italian friends, chains workshops where he teaches and workshops where he learns, here or there.
After an escape to the design, here he finally stalled in the sculpture.
He is introduced to resin, to drape on wood. On the metal side, he discovers a foundry near Père Lachaise, where we have been working in the old age for three generations. Immediate Collaboration.
In 2001, he was found in Moscow, where he exhibited. The Moscow School of Fine Arts welcomes him again in 2002, this time to work on a wooden sculpture. In the same year, the “sculpting workshops” were born in France. Objective: To offer, at affordable prices, tools, techniques, materials, expos.
It is a great lady, in stone of Massangis, all in tendrils, in volutes, in sails, in winds, which intrigues, the passersby of the street Chardanne, near St Gervais. In 2005, the city wanted a bowl of air for this too wise pedestrian street… Mounir Chaïbi flew for 2 mystery spirals, carved in a good old limestone from the Lower Cretaceous… Sails of the Orient, Virgin of the West, Gypsy enjuponnées?
Depending on whether it is eaten from back, face or elsewhere, “Femméol” is multiple. His face without traits prolongs doubt and leaves it to the onlooker to imagine…
So semi-figurative, Mr. Chaïbi? Often, but nothing systematic. Either “Femtasme”, stone bust, projecting a woman-bow, a beauty nickel. Density of breasts, tensions of the clavicles, waves of loops. We are in front of an ancient statuary, where everything is said. What does this have to do with the enigmatic Lady of St Gervais? None, except this taste of the author for the surprise, the heterogeneous, the multiple… To be convinced, a simple rotation of 180 ° around the beautiful is enough: we discover then the monster that is bent behind his back and explains his curious posture.
But the simple, the net, the direct, also seduces this handy artist, tinkering, touches everything, who recognizes his difficulty in “naming” His creatures: “I’m afraid it will freeze!”. So, originally, never the verb or the idea, but always the Visible: the veins of a walnut, the nuances of an alabaster, the countless drawings that accumulate since childhood.
The gist is in Genesis. Seven years for this “pious woman”, slowly sprang from an olive block, in the end, the face of a Madonna, half hidden by a fringe of draped wood. Another story, another adventure. “In a bar in Lille, a night of depression, I drew all night. From these sketches, will be born, much later, “Hayes”, a kind of puzzle in bronze, curious bas relief, where the lightness of the gestures of her hair is amplified by the heaviness of the oblong breasts.
“Water”, in resin loaded with iron, tells a Zen man, with eyes closed, and it is on a penis that closes this hand in Soapstone… work without title, that one, like so many others… We will have understood, Mounir likes filiations, but not collections.
“One sculpture is going to suggest another, to open my appetite, but to repeat the same with a zest of difference is to kill the previous work”.
Claude Aubert, professor of letters and Director of the Fugitive ST mended Museum