Along the Mediterranean shore, four children walk beside a man who faces the horizon. The scene is simple, almost silent, yet it carries the weight of transmission — protection, trust, and the unspoken inheritance of memory. The sea is not merely a backdrop; it is ancestral, vast and luminous, holding both childhood and departure. Painted from a distance in time and place, this work reflects on belonging — on how we move forward together, between memory and promise.

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.