Maher Maaoui (b. 1982, Tunis) is a painter and visual artist based in Paris. His work explores the articulation between memory, emotional emergence and the reconstruction of inner landscapes. Drawing from a multicultural Mediterranean heritage, his practice combines painting, printmaking and installation, revealing images that oscillate between abstraction and figuration.

 

Maaoui’s visual language is built through layers, erasures and reappearances, engaging with the notion of the palimpsest. His recent research draws on Andalusian and Moorish geometries—motifs that echo his childhood spent between the workshop of his father, a wood craftsman, and the architectural textures of Tunisia. These influences resurface in his compositions through grids, patterns and luminous structures acting as pathways through uncertainty and emotional turbulence.

 

In his newest body of work, Maaoui develops original azulejo-inspired matrices using linocut and other printing techniques. These structures become anchors from which new landscapes emerge, resisting opacity and invoking forms that transcend intention. His practice interrogates how light, transparency and patterned repetition can generate states of heightened attention and presence, revealing images that hover between clarity and disappearance.

 

Maaoui’s work has been exhibited in France, Tunisia and internationally. He continues to expand his research at the intersection of memory, identity and the shifting territories of perception.