At a young age, he showed a strong interest for music and paintings, never ceasing to draw.
He first briefly studied graphic design, then attended the Fine Arts School in Marseille in 2015.
He graduated twice with a first diploma in 2018, and another one in 2020.
Since 2016 Fabien Gharbi has been developing a practice of painting founded on a vision of a system involving colorful geometric shapes. This practice stretches out on a whole body of works which includes reflections about the world at the threshold of the 21st century.
Using a synthetic spirit, he shows a collection of miscellaneous elements that would rather belong to music, architecture, or various industrial objects among others. Thanks to a mathematical approach of painting, he makes these arithmetic combinations play between them, made colourful through plenty of geometric shapes, which are arranged on the surface of handmade canvases. That way, the shape of the support takes part in the image within itself, determining the sens of it, and reinforcing the autonomy of the artwork.
Considered on one hand topics of genres, construction, on the other hand phenomenons crossing science, nature and culture are deploying themselves in a flat pictural space where the search of balance has replaced the quest for depth and three-dimensional perspectives.
The alleged absence of representational figures as well as the formal semblance with minimalist ideologies of concrete art somehow cover a kind of accusative, almost misanthrope lyrism, with postmodern tendencies.
We find shapes that require order, that are looking for some room in a finely selected metaphysical space, which is understandable as cut-out or detached from real world, but still depending on an arbitrary system of composition. They are tip touching, toggling, avoiding contact, getting sticked to the edges of a field that enclose them or attract them outwards, to dimensions fit for imagination. These forms are sometimes static, sometimes vibrant ; steady, equalized forms, that are about to, on the verge of.
Some supposed marks of rational lines are covered with paint, most likely employing an ever changing palette.
We know colour depends on an environment's lighting, so as a totally relative and deceptive thing. For Fabien Gharbi, colour can only be conceived as a complementary paradigm. Colour is a complex matter, prone to exchanges of rhythms, symmetries, tensions, strong or weak spots, willing to serve a poetic purpose to afterall simple yet precise surfaces of rich colour shades.