Between Two Shores

I am a painter, but before painting I spent a long time looking at women and men, at their histories, their frailties and their memories.
My working life among refugees, in social and community work, taught me something essential: behind every face, every place, every object there is a story that deserves to be heard and passed on.

So when I paint, I am seeking less to depict than to preserve.
To preserve a light, a land, a face, a motif, a memory. I paint the Tunisia of my origins and my forebears: the landscapes of the South, the Berber villages, the arid lands, the arabesques and the signs of a heritage sometimes threatened by forgetting.

But I also paint the France where I live: its landscapes, its villages, its light — the Ardèche, Mont-Saint-Michel…
In my painting these two worlds do not stand opposed. They answer and complete one another.

I think of Jacques Berque and his Mémoires des deux rives, of the singular way he had of setting East and West in dialogue without ever giving up the complexity of either.

I think too of Paul Klee, spellbound by Tunisia and by its light, and of Alexandre Roubtzoff, who also knew how to look at Tunisia with heart and deep sensitivity. Those ways of seeing speak to me because they understood that the Mediterranean is not only a geography. It is a shared memory, a space of crossings, encounters and mingling.

Perhaps that is where my own path as a painter lies.
Between North and South.
Between East and West.
Between what I have received and what I pass on.
I am not looking to choose between the two shores.
I paint the space that binds them: the Mediterranean.