Discover the abstract works of Salah Ghezal, a committed artist seeking greater freedom of expression

Salah Ghezal, encouraging artistic expression to live better together.

Since moving to the Lyon region in 2017, Salah Ghezal has been committed to developing an inclusive vision of contemporary art. By hosting artistic events in the form of workshops, performances or installations, he hopes to bring together experienced artists but also to make artistic creation accessible to all, children and adults, beginners and advanced. He works as an artist in his personal capacity but also in his association Art & Créativité in Vaulx-en-Velin.

An artist committed to living together

Trained as an architect, Salah Ghezal has participated in various development projects, including for public spaces, since he likes to design large-scale spaces that correspond to our current, open and citizen lifestyles. However, since 2017, it has changed its focus to explore the many possibilities for expression offered by the visual arts. He now divides his time between Paris and Lyon, on shared spaces, residences and events. He says, "Since childhood, I’ve been exploring the properties of materials around me. I make new and original compositions. It’s just that I didn’t know that it could be called contemporary art, I didn’t know the word, I thought I was the only one doing these kinds of works..."

Create from environmental materials

As a raw material, Salah uses the ubiquitous waste in the city, such as plastics and cardboard, for monumental and personal creations. He also practices Arabic calligraphy with calames he prunes himself and standard Chinese ink, although he also knows traditional recipes based on roasted coffee ponds or cherry pits. Working with the dark, the opaque or the dark is also working with light, between the abstract and the figurative, he says, and then these are the materials so common in the city. I am very sensitive to this because I was born in a very natural mountainous region in Algeria."
To create his works of art, he recovers pieces of plastic around, among other things, then cuts or burns them according to the desired effect. Then, on this support which serves as a base, he can give free rein to his imagination and his inspiration: for example, he models faces the size of a hand or assembles a monumental fountain of 20 meters - a version is currently kept at the school of Beaux-ArtsArts de Lyon. "When I do a workshop or a performance using recovered materials, I also try to convey a message. For example, workshops with suburban children were designed to reflect on citizenship and living together, as the city was recording more and more frequent acts of vandalism. Artistic creation defuses judgments and allows for dialogue on serious facts.

Creation is a source of inspiration

Generally what attracts the public the most is that Salah Ghezal practices a form of free creation, born of personal concerns in resonance with those of society: the consumer society, the degradation of the environment, the stakes of life in the city. He thinks that even if an artist can be committed to the social causes that are important to him, he must also seek to inspire others, to encourage them to create themselves or to express themselves in the most personal way possible. This is why it participates as soon as it can in public and popular cultural events, inaugurations or meetings for example, by proposing tailor-made installations, often participative and always innovative. Cultivate a different look at the city: this would define its artistic approach.