The expression or Khaled Ben Sliman, a painter and ceramist, is fascinating both through its suggestive power and extensive wealth of forms ~ labour of the ceramist modeler shaping matter; outlook of the visual artist reinventing，through his “arrangements”, the syntax of the visible; gesture of the scribe calligraphist ennobling, through the redemptive touch of the sign, the whole world of objects. His historic work drains in its wake the omens of the unsaid and promises of the spiritual.

Since the time of his apprenticeship at the ceramics workshop of Tunisia’ s Institute of Fine Arts of Tunisia(ITAAUT), Khaled Ben Sliman, has been storing a few items made out of baked earthware or ceramics, such as parallelepiped-shaped vases with narrow neck——works of a student still grappling with technique-related problems. His first exhibition of ceramics, held in 1982 at the Attaswir Art Gallery, reveals a research drive whereby the tormented marks of fire on substance can be deciphered. Such a drive was to be pursued till 1984, yielding those carbonized and metallic looking bowls, studded with swellings, as well as those ripped open containers…The thematic of anxiety will thus gradually give way to the premises of a recovered serenity，following the artist’s return to ancient forms and techniques-utility containers, tested recipes of the enamels and glazes of tradition.

Thus, Ben Sliman has imperceptlPly shitted toward the adoption of a new approach, foregoing the systematic pursuit of formal innovation to engage thought on immemorial concepts of pottery: humbly trying to recapture the ancestral gesture of the potter, reproducing the eternal theme of the bowl, cup, plate; recreating these items and transfiguring their outlook through the alchemy of enamels and the magic of signs. Hence, the artist will have processed the prosaic, every day life form in such a way as to upgrade it to the dignified status of a work of art. Research on enamel could have been his best learning skills derived from attending the Escuella Massana of Barcelona, Whilst the power and simplicity of graphic designs on light backgrounds constituted his best acquired leaning from his stay in Japan where he had rubbed shoulders with those “living national treasures” of the Japanese ceramics. All this had nurtured him for assuming his vocation as an alchemist transmuting humble clay into items of vast spirituality, such as the ivory-white cups bearing the bold mark of a black graphic design. The name of God, multiplied to the frantic rhythm of dhikr(remembrance of God), overflows the bi-dimensional space of paintings to invest the surface of containers. In 1987, the catalogue of forms was to be enriched by those high cylindrical steles with polychrome enamel. By the same token, the register of signs has been broadened to encompass huge “calligraphies” transcribing the names of the four elements vigorously brushed on plates, saucers, cylindrical steles upon which the divine name Huwa would also be inscribed. During 1998 “Horizontal steles” appeared. In fact, they are “funerary architectures” ——a new medium for an unusual though on death. Be the funerary art or a totally new approach to the theme of eternity, these steles further engage Ben Sliman ’s work along the path of metaphysics. During the 1990s, his propensity for the transcendental was to be confirmed by multiple spiritual testimonies that had culminated in the memorial erected for paying tribute to Sidi Quacem Jelizi, patron saint of ceramists, or the big fresco adorning a square at the town of Gibellina in Sicily(1992).

Khaled Ben Sliman is among those rare artists who have taken on the challenge of regenerating the prestigious tradition of ceramics in Tunisia. The workshop of the Fine Art School of Tunisia and, later on, the ITAAUT, had failed to ensure a continuum of a rich ancestral legacy. For some ceramists-former students of the above school-survival did not seem possible without making necessary concessions for a commercial production that would guarantee minimum subsistence of their workshops. Yet, Khaled Ben Sliman has always refused to make the least concession, thus his endeavours are considered as milestones along the path of vindicating genuine ceramics.

Ben Sliman’s art equally refuses to break with patrimony, whether at the level of execution or from the point of view of aesthetic choices．He is constantly seeking out for the possibility of perpetuating tradition into contemporary life; he has re-invented a permanent rapport to artistic heritage with discernment and conviction, far from easy-made or eccentric recipes. He has maintained a continued momentum toward the essential, for the sake of achieving further soberness and ascetics in pursuit of fundamental truths and concepts.

Concerns for the absolute in the work of Ben Sliman was revealed, in a dramatic manner, during the exhibition of May 1989 at the Chiyem Art Gallery where he had lined up on the ground what he calls “horizontal steles”. The event is, for that matter, a culminating point, or rather the highest amplitude of a wave generated by the very first manifestations of his art. In the course of his performance record as visionary artist, Ben Sliman has not wandered much by exploring a plurality of modes and profusion of styles. Would an artist, who has felt committed, since his debut, to the way of initiation, be permitted to indulge in hesitating or experimenting tastes? Through its changing expression and misleading and contradictory manifestations (daily and utilitarian art combined with gnosis and mystic ecstasy), Ben Sliman’ s artistic endeavour might lead one to believing that he has an immoderate taste for unusual and paradoxical; nonetheless, this must not divert our attention from the forces that underpin his universe, crystallizing in a single will, secret and sustained, to reach out for the invisible through the visible, and the absolute，through the changing and ephemeral aspect of tangible reality. This quest manifests itself through signs, symbols, invocations, evocations, cries, scansions, and is expressed, sometimes, in the “architectures of eternity”, such as those tombstones, epitaphs and other steles raising a mysterious prayer toward heavens.

Khaled Ben Sliman re-lives with great delight the materiality of the calligraphist’s gesture, that of the potter’s and even the architect’ s, and it is when his hands are dipped in clay and fingers blotted with ink, in the midst of a physical experience of matter, that he attains the essence of the visual art-some kind of abstraction exuding a perfume of eternity.