Hatem El Mekki was born in Batavia (currently Jakarta) and attended Le lycée Carnot de Tunis, where he mastered the Chinese aquarelle technique, before travelling to Paris on a government scholarship. In Paris, he was an artist-in-residence at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts, and during this time there produced illustrations, worked in film, and collaborated with the French magazine Marianne. His work La Femme et le Coq (1950s) shows a woman holding a cockerel in her arms, set against a stark black background. The female figure and the bird are both rendered as mere silhouettes, distinguished only by a white chalk-like outline and a red wattle on the cockerel’s head. The woman looks directly at the viewer, her eyes wide open and her arms – executed in a hurried, almost macabre manner – grasp at the bird. In many cultures, the cockerel is considered a symbol of hope and a new dawn, and in the context of El Mekki’s painting can be read as signalling Tunisia’s liberation from the French colonial protectorate in a process that took place between 1952 and 1956.
—Suheyla Takesh
