Someone once said: "If Atlas, who carried the world on his shoulders, was not crushed by this weight, it was because he was a dancer". This is also the story of this street entertainer “Bou Saadiya” Mythical character of Tunisian popular folklore, dancer and street musician, half acrobat half sorcerer.
Bou Saadiya roams the streets and cities of Tunisia wearing his clown disguise in the colors of Africa to give dance performances to the rhythm of "Stimbeli" music.
Bou Saadiya entertains the spectators, but his heart is heavy; he searches among the crowd around him for the face of his daughter who has been taken from him.

This series, painted between 2015 and 2022, marks an inward turning.
After the landscapes of childhood and the murmuring sea, I moved toward the body — the body as territory, as archive, as fracture.

During my time in Tehran, something in my painting grew denser. Faces became more frontal, flesh heavier, gazes more insistent. I painted men and women encountered in passing, figures shaped by the street, presences born of my own origins — silhouettes bearing history, fatigue, endurance, and quiet dignity.

From Francis Bacon, I absorbed a certain tension of the body — that subtle distortion that reveals vulnerability beneath composure.
From Lucian Freud, the patience of matter, the obstinacy of paint, the uncompromising truth of skin.
From Alice Neel, the psychological directness: to paint someone is to endure their gaze.

Yet these works are not quotations. They are threaded with my own fault lines — my Tunisian roots, my crossings between shores, my encounters in Tehran’s streets, markets, interiors heavy with silence, and fragmented conversations.

The carpet seller, the weathered faces of time, motherhood, the sleeper, Bou Saâdiya, the wave, the Yazdi, the child by the sea, the taxiphone — each figure carries an intimate geography.
Each canvas attempts to hold together Mediterranean memory, Persian light, and the quiet displacement of the in-between.

In this collection, the paint thickens, colors deepen into earth and rust, contrasts sharpen.
I no longer search for the diffuse light of remembrance; I search for presence.

Painting becomes an act of recognition.
To recognize the other.
To recognize, within them, something of myself.