Sandra Remili | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

Sandra Remili has developed a strong, marked, established identity for her painting. Influenced by her Tunisian origins on the one hand and a Belgian grandmother on the other, she enhances the mix of sources and aesthetics as references in her practice. Resolutely instinctive and symbolic, her painting draws from the codes of urban, popular culture, French poster designers like Jacques Villeglé and American neo-expressionists exploring the world of graffiti like Jean-Michel Basquiat.\nThe city of Lisbon, where Sandra Remili set herself up in 2011 allows the artist to glimpse the many possibilities of painting. Collage, calligraphy, material and texture effects, thickness, writing, luminosity of colours – all ingredients tally with what the artist calls “the unchangeable trinity” that defines her: dynamism, spontaneity and energy. The techniques, like the materials, merge. Acrylics, spray paints and pastels are superimposed to create explosive colours, sketched, bad-tempered and suggestive forms, close to what the artist calls “urban expressionism”.\nThe different blocks of material and the layers of colours, left on the canvas with an urge, a pulsation, words affixed without any true rhythmical will, traces, imprints, consequences of a primary gesture – all of these elements are mixed up and saturate the surface of the piece. A word, a shape, a shadow – they are the signs of a new visual language, time that passes, a look, a strange dissimulated presence in the verticality of the paintings. Behind these touches of light, the waltz of whites, yellows, blues and reds hides a world that seems about to crumble, one where everything is created and transformed.\n