Chadha Brahmi, a 23-year-old architecture student from Tunisia, never considered herself an artist. She compares her artwork to her weightlifting. She is suffering to create something better and beautiful.
There are various themes in her work, but the disembodied eye is the birthplace of it all, the form from which it all sprouts, and the foundation of her uncategorizable vision. Her depictions of eyes and the accompanying disembodied beauty verges on the horrific and occasionally slips into a kind of modern-day impressionism of body horror of the silenced subject. These are artworks that can seem like sketches or illustrations and can veer into collage, peppered with found objects or cut open like a pop-up book in progress to reveal the artifice of the 2-D. They can have the extreme allure of satire and its caricatured vision of reality even when they are always awash in watercolors that give an unnerving living quality to them, and often are like blood splatters on the page.
It turns out that Chadra Brahmi’s first attempt at a realistic artwork was an eye. It was just pencil work, nothing fancy, but for her it was a revelation. Jump ahead 4 years, and Brahmi began practicing watercolors when she discovered the amount of life it gave to paintings and more specifically to eyes. This is when she started abusing eyes in drawings and started adding more details each time and practicing different techniques to reach the sensation she wanted to get. And over time, her interest in eyes has only grown.
When she started doing bigger paintings meant to capture a cohesive vision, the eyes always found found their way in. But to what effect? And why?
The aforementioned impressionist (or perhaps more expressionist) body horror is best exemplified in the piece above where it is explicitly rendered in a full portrait. Brahmi tends to either create portraits with elements of the horrific like the one above—albeit an extreme example—or an implied violence as presented on a single facet of the face, most of the eye, but also lips or mouth and nose. My favorite pieces by her are these beautifully rendered mysteries, erotic, horrific, off-putting, and often capturing several moments in quick succession, like a glance seen in passing.
But that having been said, the jarring prettiness and simultaneous grotesquery displayed above, both finely detailed and couched in an abstraction of blood smears and S&M black, both a nose like from some pretty illustration out of a vintage fashion magazine, and lips sown shut in a garish obscenity of crude black stitching—captures the sense of our historical moment with an iconic clarity. I am reminded of Francis Bacon, but this is a millenial Francis Bacon, beautiful, young, and helpless in the face of apocalypse, in the face of a world coming undone by greed and fear.
But is this the why of her work?
Brahmi herself describes her process as a “rollercoaster that I’m trying to adapt to”. And she goes on. “Basically it all starts with me trying to remind myself how to draw.”
She begins with random pictures her mind is playing around with that are then triggered by some event or artwork that insipires her to draw out these ideas, often incorporating in a “very basic face drawing” which can be fractured into a kind of cartoonish cubism or just free-floating.
She goes on. “And when I look at it, and it actually exists not only in my head, it gives a whole new sense of inspiration so I start adding stuff little by little, and the idea I once had starts to find its way into the sketch and… when it comes to the painting part, watercolors and all, I mostly always start with the face… Seeing the eyes sparkling and looking at me kinda obligates more to finish the whole thing, like it’s alive now and there’s no running away from it. So I start with the watercolor layers, one by one, and let me tell you it is a very exhausting process… Either the paper gets ruined from too much water at a time, or I use highly pigmented watercolors as an attempt to reach the concentration of color I want faster, and it ends up playing around on paper and ending up in places it’s not supposed to be wandering in… So yeah the thing is I just keep making mistakes and the whole process is me trying to fix those mistakes the best way possible, and after finishing the initial things I had in mind, new things, unplanned things start coming in and forcing themselves into the painting as well… I know I will not obey to my own rules… I just start adding tiny little storyboards, colored pencils, ink, collage, whatever feels fit to the whole vibe, and sometimes when I take a step back, it feels too much, like very overwhelming as a painting or as something to look at… [But] then I realize it’s not overwhelming, that’s just who I am on paper, like that’s literally me… So my whole process is experimental, a friend once told me it’s more like a ‘fluxus’ approach that I’m leaning towards, and it made sense.”
This maximalist approach, free from the restrictions of even her own rules, allows Brahmi to explore avenues to herself unbridled by the usual baggage, to use bold colors and storyboarding techniques along with her watercolors and inkwork to create interesting and off-putting effects. The very fact that she, by her own admission, must “learn how to draw all over again” invites this kind of inventiveness. She is coming at her own motifs from a fresh perspective each time she attacks the process of creation.
So, the paintings are personal, spontaneous and free from one specific allegorical or critical understanding. They can, like the image above, veer more into the realm of a more abstract pop surrealism, but always with that violent sexuality. But being spontaneous, they also feel a bit like a journey in, that we are witnessing Brahmi peeling back the onion of herself to see what she can find. The blood itself could be seen as a metaphor for this inner journey. She keeps digging deeper.
But how did it all begin?
“Sooo my first encounter with the idea of creating was when I was about 4 years old maybe, I had this short stories collection, you know the tiny little cute ones with pictures all over it. And back then I wasn’t doing much, I was about to start school and had a lot of free time and I never [had] many friends, cause I was mainly always alone and didn’t like human interactions much, didn’t talk much too, that’s basically cause I’m the youngest child and my sisters are relatively way bigger so they had their own worlds and I was left aside to create my own, and I’m kinda thankful for that now. So yeah I remember deciding then to recreate those stories, like I wanted to make my own hand-made short stories collection… [Then I] started creating outfits for my dolls… Then I didn’t like the faces of my models… Fast forward to the end of my 19th year… I spent a few months in bed and then somehow brought out the sketchbook I haven’t touched in 2 years or so. I started drawing again… Then COVID hit and we had to stay at home… [And I decided] to not be afraid of watercolors anymore… so I started experimenting, I was continuously experimenting.”
In Brahmi’s artwork this experimentation has led to some images that are addictive to behold, and at best, her work is a mystery or crime scene in the making, and we are left as detectives attempting to piece together this visual haiku even when we know we will never be able to. There is a purity here too, in that her work comes from no clear ideological position but arose spontaneously from her inclinations and inner journey. (Neither from the quirky amateurism of the outside artist nor the irony and studied agony of the MFA graduate.) That is, as Brahmi puts it, it has that ‘fluxus’ authenticity, that is “literally” her.
Other than the eyes, her use of watercolor really stands out as quintessential Brahmi. As she says, watercolor is “not willing to compromise… I loved that about it.”
The above image uses both to dramatic effect. Perhaps my favorite piece by her, this eye for some reason makes me think of Jesus, but Jesus the drag queen, Jesus the over-dose. Of course, the touch of blue streaked here and there frames it in some modern context, mascara running, and that single detail seems to ground this eye in any number of crime scenes, flophouses, and the bedrooms of runaways. This is an eye that fits everywhere from the spiritual suffering Golgotha to the seediness of Las Vegas and all stops in between.
What I personally love about Brahmi’s work is the space it occupies between literal realism and something abstract, and the abstraction often comes in the form of watercolors.
“And that particular characteristic of watercolors, [it’s refusal to compromise] helped me express my hatred for boundaries even more, it was really flowing just like my thoughts when I’m in the process of making something, it always feels like I’m painting with my own soul and not some brush, that explains why the colors always turn out to be on the same spectrum even if I intentionally try to change the vibe it always comes back to it, cause it is my own and I can’t change my essence.”
Brahmi speaks through images.
“When I look at the finished piece I realize she’s going through what I’m going through internally, the painting is saying what I fail to verbalize… At first I felt very exposed, but… it is my shadow and it wouldn’t do me any good trying to overlook it, so instead I’m working with it and appreciating its existence, it is helping me create beautiful stuff and that’s enough for me to cherish it.”
Brahmi can create images that are minimalist and elusive, or, like with the one above, maximalist and overwhelming. Like a true experimentalist, she allows her work to move as it will, and there are certainly images of hers that speak to us here at Mutable more than others, but the overarching project is mapping out a new space in the art of our age, capturing the terror and allure of civilization poised on the edge of the precipice, a truly apocalyptic vision, an art for the end times.
“I am on my own road to interpreting it, but that doesn’t turn down the fact that each person that sees it go on their own roads too, and it does make sense, cause as I said my artworks are never planned at first, I’m just discovering the final piece when it’s fully done, so eventually I am a spectator too.”
In Brahmi’s art, her unconscious is realized, and what visions have sprung forth! Images that are both pulp and high art. Imagery that lives in a world between, between allegorical and dreamlike and a hyperreality, between something adolescent and naive and something with an unnerving knowingness about it, between fragmented and minimalist and a kind of overwhelming maximalism. We can only hope that her journey takes her deeper in and continues to provide us with work of such uncompromising and unsettling beauty.
