Somewhere between mineral abstraction and buried memories, this self-taught artist brings forth inner landscapes where the material seems to reveal a world even more intense than reality.
By Meryem Sebti
Frontière Minérale, 2025, oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm
Far from any academic rigor, Souad Bennani Smires’s artistic journey is slow and uneven, marked by solitary experimentation, restarts, abandonments, and digressions. Moving backward in time, she develops a powerful artistic voice. A sensation of a living, almost organic surface, as if the painting had preceded the gaze. The work arises from a shift in scale: structures approaching the infinitely small—almost cellular or mineral in nature—are expanded into large formats until they become abstract landscapes. Through layering, material, and controlled accidents, Souad Bennani Smires brings to the surface an invisible world that paradoxically seems more real than reality itself.
It brings to mind a form of contemporary cave art—a similar gesture that involves inscribing onto the surface a memory that precedes the image. By bringing forth traces rather than figures, her painting reveals more than it depicts. Perhaps this is where her work comes into play: in this tension between emergence and concealment, between what she shows and what pulses beneath the surface yet persists in remaining hidden.
This translation was generated using AI. For the original text, please see the French version of this article.
Sédiment, 2025, mixed media, 160 x 180 cm
