Toufik Medjamia was born in Algeria in 1978.  He has been living in Marseilles, France since 1994. He attended the Ecole supérieur d’Art of Aix-en-Provence from which he graduated in 2007.

“My main focus is on imagery, on all sorts of images, whether they relate to our everyday life or international issues, are intimate or transmitted through the media, whether they are real or imaginary.  These images shape the way we see and act upon the world.

We are swamped with images which give us the impression of a multiplicity of points of view, of channels of expression, but in fact most of these images convey a limited number of ideas, serving as a vehicle for a stereotyped imagery of people, things and events.  These modern images are always moving, always short lived which leaves no time to decypher them and gives the impression that the information is renewed.

The developpment of new techniques to generate images and the automation
of tools and users lead to the creation of an overabundant and non informative imagery.  My painting explores the relationship between a machine generated imagery and man painted imagery.  Working from real images, I use a machine to create original images that could be seen as “bugs” since they were not planned by the machine’s programming.  This deconstruction of images is also a way to deconstruct set images like stereotypes.  I then use painting to fix the images created, to shift them from one medium to the other, from one temporality to the other.  It allows me to express what is not really visible or understandable in the real world and to subvert stereotypical imageries.