Rafik El Kamel was born in 1944 in Tunis. He graduated from the Institut supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Tunis in 1966 and the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1970. El Kamel returned to Tunisia in 1971 and taught at his alma mater while building his artistic career.
Rafik El Kamel was one of the first Tunisian painters to turn to abstraction, alongside Hedi Turki and Edgard Naccache. As early as 1967, he opposed the hegemony of the school of Tunis`s founders, whose work was heavily indebted to neo-orientalist figuration. After studying in the city`s school of fine arts, El kamel left for Paris and enrolled at ENSAD, where he specialised in monumental art of impressive height and build, he retained from his sporting past a physical approach to painting, especially in large-format works. In Paris, he was confronted by innovative artistic trends that were unknown in Tunisia at the time. On his return to Tunisia in 1976, El Kamel joined the group of artists that crystallised around Nejib Belkhodja ( 1933 – 2007 ) and advocated freeing painting from the stranglehold of the school of Tunis. The group used the galerie Irtissem, founded by Mahloud Sehili ( 1931 – 2015 ), as a meeting point and the place to publicly display their practise, which had the ambition to restore autonomy to the artwork. El Kamel entered an intense exploration of plastic expression in which the organisation of the colours and forms on canvas is of prime importance.
His paintings were often of remarkable dimensions, like arenas where chance was his guide. He Then investigated and appropriated collage, the technique invented by cubists in the 1910s that proved essential to 20th – century art. To create his collages, he would paint sheets of paper before cutting them up and experimenting with colours and textures, leaving room for unforeseen effects.
He then assembled the different elements as though they were a puzzle. When he deemed the composition satisfactory, he set out to recreate it on canvas on a larger scale. Here, again, the unknown was the yeast in what seemed an entertaining adventure, in which gestural freedom and chance sparked the emergence of expressive and dynamic compositions that enabled the artist to reconfigure his perspective on the world. He remained committed to his exhilarating emancipation that allowed him to develop a dialogue between art and life.