Saoussen Maalem, a French poet and painter born and raised in Algeria, uses language and colors to paint pictures of the “unutterable.”
To express beyond the constraints of a particular language is to venture into the bone marrow of art, to flesh out the imaginary, and, in the artist’s words, to “look inside the cut, raw and unhealed, and dive with a soul catching itself falling.”
The vibrancy of the palette and words complement and complete each other, painting dynamic imagery of transformation, fate, and judgment.
Unlike other contributors, it seems that, for Saoussen, art isn’t necessarily a journey but a religious mission. A solemn pilgrimage of beauty, if you will, that comes across as a stern and stoic desire to paint using words—visual subtitles to the forms and feelings captured otherwise in oil and color.
Acceptant of this Sisyphean endeavor, the artist agrees that in the end, one “cannot heal history with history.” Perhaps no one should even be able to.
Read our “Tenderness” issue in full
In this debut issue, 16 artists from around the world took part in an editorial experiment where the theme emerged organically from the submitted artworks, shaped by what they had in common, and not predefined by editors.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
