MOHAMED SAÏD CHAIR: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

 

I deliberately use the codes of classical painting—composition, chiaroscuro, oil painting—because they are powerful visual languages, loaded with history. I also want to echo the Orientalist painting of the 19th century, particularly in the work of Delacroix, Gérôme, or Regnault, who depicted Arab-Maghrebi societies through an external gaze that was often idealized or stereotyped, and focused on spectacular scenes or luxurious interiors.

 

I use these same tools to speak about my own society, from the inside and in a contemporary context. It is not an identity-based approach. This contrast between classical pictorial language and a contemporary perspective allows me to propose a different image of Moroccan society—contemporary, closer to its reality, and treated with the same gravity as major historical subjects. I want to show ordinary scenes: everyday places and a middle class that is rarely represented in classical realist painting.

 

 

Violence is omnipresent in our daily lives, but it is not always spectacular. It is often diffuse, latent, and silent. What interests me is not explicit violence, but the tension that precedes or follows the act.

 

Chiaroscuro helps me a lot with this. Historically, it is associated with dramatic, theatrical scenes. It amplifies emotion and dramatizes without necessarily showing. It allows me to conceal, suggest, and fragment space. Light is never decorative—it is narrative. It guides the viewer’s gaze, organizes the elements, and creates zones of silence. I often think of Hitchcock’s cinema, where suggestion is far more powerful than demonstration. A shadow on a wall can be more violent than a direct gesture because it engages the viewer’s imagination.

I also enjoy working with oil paint, because it allows me to work with matter, flesh, and light with great depth. It gives a physical density to the bodies. It is also a slow technique, which imposes a certain rhythm. Painting becomes a meditative, almost spiritual act. For me, the pictorial gesture is not intellectual—it is visceral. It passes through the body.

 

 

For me, play and violence are intimately linked. Play may appear innocent, but it always rests on rules, power dynamics, winners and losers. In my adolescence, for example, we often played games like UNO, and these games could quickly escalate into dares, humiliations, or symbolic punishments.

 

In this series, play becomes a metaphor. It represents a society in which we are all playing several games at the same time, without always understanding the rules or knowing who established them. The contrast between play and violence reveals the absurdity of certain contemporary situations. And this absurdity is intentional. When you look at the scene from afar, it seems readable: a bar scene, a game scene, a fight. But the closer you get, the more the logic cracks. The actions are not synchronized, gestures do not respond to one another. It is a way of translating the ordinary chaos in which we evolve. We continue to act, consume, and play, even when the world becomes unreadable. This incoherence seems very representative of our time.

 

 

Since the Renaissance, the function of the face has changed: it primarily served to represent kings, power, and grandeur. The face became a central and essential element—the very core of painting, its pillar. At that time, painters had different motivations: they responded to commissions, often for royalty, and distinguished themselves mainly through their techniques. Some artists, however, went beyond simple representation to convey real emotion—like Rembrandt or Caravaggio. Caravaggio was among the first to break away from Mannerism, which glorified gods and idealized figures with perfect bodies inherited from Greek aesthetics. Instead, he proposed a more authentic painting: even his biblical characters were not idealized but deeply human.

 

Today, portraiture can no longer be limited to a face, in my view. Identity is multiple, shifting, and fragmented. That is why I feel the need to rethink portraiture as a scene, a context, and a sum of elements rather than a simple frontal representation.

 

On my scale, I also try to break with another form of contemporary mannerism: that of Instagram, fashion magazines, and smooth, standardized aesthetics. Social media has homogenized bodies and faces. Flaws are erased in the search for perfection. The face has become a mask. I prefer to focus precisely on what resists this homogenization: awkward gestures, imperfect bodies, ambiguous situations. I want the gaze to settle elsewhere—on posture, on relationships between bodies, on objects, on space. Identity cannot be reduced to a face. It is fragmented, composite, contextual. Bodies, clothes, and objects are often more sincere. They carry a history, a traceability. An object does not lie in the way a face can.

 

 

The work begins very early, long before the painting itself. I really conceive the construction of a work as a staging. The canvas is never a starting point but an outcome. Before arriving at the painted image, there is a whole series of steps: scouting locations, searching for spaces that already carry an emotional, architectural, or symbolic charge, meeting the models, choosing objects, costumes, and situations.

 

I then take photographs, but they are only tools. Photography is static by nature, whereas the canvas must be alive. Starting from this frozen image, I reconnect with dynamism on the canvas. The painting will never be a reproduction of the photograph, because I change the colors, textures, and tensions according to what I want to express. I construct a real framework, almost documentary, which I then transform pictorially. This preparation is essential because it allows me to move away from prefabricated iconography. For a long time I worked from images found on the internet, but those images are already conditioned—they carry a discourse that is not mine. Today I need to create my own situations, my own scenes, in order to tell exactly the story I want to tell.

 

 

Movement is a real challenge for a painter. It is dynamic and unstable, and yet it must be conveyed on a static surface. I want each image to give the impression of suspended movement. Even frozen, the scene must remain unstable.

 

The body becomes a language: postures, imbalances, unfinished gestures tell more than any facial expression. Photography freezes movement. The challenge is to bring life back onto the canvas. A painting can be dynamic even if it is motionless. You see the tension of fabrics, draperies, and bodies. Even in scenes of play, where the characters are seated, there is movement.

 

 

It is both a continuation on the technical and conceptual level, while also marking a significant evolution. In my previous series, the characters wore boxes on their heads—an element that became central to my visual language. Over time, this box mostly functioned as a covering, a way to hide the face. Paradoxically, I was talking about everything except the box itself: it was mainly a trigger for reflection. But gradually I felt it was taking too much space, to the detriment of other essential elements in the works.

 

This new series is a natural extension of that work, but refocused on the human being. The box is still symbolically present, but it is no longer visible. I deliberately distance myself from this element in order to go further, not remain in a comfort zone, and allow the painting to breathe differently. The first work of the series, The Last Evening (2024–2025), clearly marks this rupture. The boxes appear in the lower left of the painting: they are stored away, set aside in the shadows, like an intentional gesture marking a transition from the previous work.

The quality of the work has also evolved, particularly thanks to photography, which gave me the desire to deepen details, textures, and presence. I am increasingly interested in representing contemporary society, especially the middle class, which I am in the process of immortalizing. I now start from the human being—I paint human beings.

 

 

We are living through a period of economic, social, and cultural transition. The middle class is transforming and becoming more fragile, and I feel the need to immortalize this moment—not to judge it, but to observe it, stage it, and above all make it visible. To bring social and human dimensions back to the center—dimensions that are essential but too often pushed into the background.

 

This is where the human reappears. I try to celebrate people who go unnoticed but are nonetheless essential: delivery workers, laborers, parking attendants, or building caretakers. To highlight very real individuals—figures of society who exist but whom we do not always look at. This series deliberately plays with fiction in order to better illuminate reality.

 

The increasingly aggressive capitalist logic intensifies inequalities, while a large part of the middle class is gradually becoming poorer. But my work does not aim to be activist. Political or economic interpretations belong to the viewer. What I enjoy is painting the human being. My work remains above all a work on the body, movement, color, and matter.