Fathi’s paintings engage in a particular mode of representation founded on the logic of a paradox. The latter reveals itself in that which renders Fathi’s works to oscillate between the tradition of impressionist ‘landscape painting’ on one hand, and the illogical grammar of formalization, juxtaposition and scale historically marked in the practices of Surrealism on the other. As a result of this paradox, Fathi’s paintings are to be perceived neither as wholly abstract nor simply figurative. Both questions of abstraction and figurative representation are combined, yet without seeming to be ever merging. The depicted world in Fathi’s paintings is that of a captured moment, one that simultaneously evokes the vitality of life and its interruption fixated within the paradoxical logic of its nature. The density of the darksome and amassed backgrounds, the vibrant color palate of the illuminated foregrounds, the dystopian logic of scale set between the two, the flatness and lack of details in the belittled living creatures vis-à-vis the illustrative particularities of the vegetative world ––all in all, construct a phantasmagoric world charged with an uncanny temporality in which two notions of life and nature are interrupting one another.