I am a self taught painter born in 1982 and raised in Tunisia before settling in France in 2004. My name is Maher Maaoui and I'm signing my artworks MaMa.

I started to paint in my early childhood, after my father, a wooden toys maker, offered me a book called "L'Art de Voir" (The Art of Seeing). Since then, I intensely dissected my parents' painting collection, mostly composed of Tunisian artists of the 20th century. 

Through the years traveling and living abroad, spending countless hours in the museums of modern and contemporary art, my desire to create became a vital need enhanced by life cycle events. My work is driven by my involvement in a path for freedom and in the making of an apology of contrast, after 23 years growing up in a dictatorship marked with censorship, however totally immersed in a Mediterranean chromatic spectrum. 

My work revolves around two inseparable approaches which converge and function like communicating vessels. "Decryption" series is an approach focussed in the abstraction over the figurative work like an archeology of human beings through the decortication of photographs and videos confronted to my souvenirs and introspective journey. On the other hand, the "Suddenly" series is a live representation of strong emotions, where the figure springs in the urgency of the expression, in an accidental way, linking the work to my childhood.

All of my work is autobiographical, stemming from daily observations, lived experiences and intense and brutal emotions. This creative process raises philosophical and sociological questions, always in search of universality, introducing a dreamlike and spiritual dimension echoing the mysteries of life and death.

I am therefore exploring human vibrations and emotions through a research focused on both abstraction in portraiture and a new form of representation. I am using video, photography, and more specifically the pixelation of digital images to explore human figures. In my work, which is mostly in oil and acrylics, I recently introduced the wood in reference to my childhood and as an homage to my father. 

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Since 2015, my work has been selected in international fairs and collective exhibitions in Paris, Tunis, Sao Paulo, Venice and Tokyo and it entered numerous private collections. In 2016, I participated in a Master Class of painting with the Austrian painter Lois Renner. In 2021, one of my portraits joined the permanent collection of Fondation de la Maison de Tunisie in Paris.