Hela Lamine   
Narrative Figurations —   2007-2008 Obsession with figuration

“ I collect, archive, displace, draw, dissect, observe, replace, redraw again and again, in an almost obsessive manner. “

Media : Drawing
Themes : Body


Coming from a background in printmaking, drawing occupies a central place in my practice — never fully acquired, constantly questioned. I am interested in its technical and historical evolution, and above all in the place it can occupy in an age of mechanical reproduction. I explore Benjamin’s notion of the aura, the tension between the unique and the multiple, the original and the reproducible, the consumable and the consumed — and what remains.

I work primarily in series, using matrices based on human portraits and bodies encountered daily on the internet, in books, magazines and newspapers. The figure is often subjected to distortion, shifting between beauty and ugliness, figuration and abstraction, dream and nightmare. The human body is pushed towards its own limits — and sometimes well beyond them.

What interests me are the mechanisms that generate confusion between what is presented to the eye and what might be hidden within it. I play with — and play against — the fragile boundaries separating these two territories, most often through humour and derision.

I describe these fictions as open, in reference to Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work, in which real and imagined narratives overlap like sedimentary layers.


Medium / date:
Drawing, printmaking, 2007–2008.
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