HAMADI BEN SAAD (1965-2025)

Self-taught and tireless nomadic artist, Hamadi Ben Saad has developed, over the past forty years, an artistic practice in direct resonance with the urban world and his encounters. Detached from all conventions, his art is subordinated solely to the physical properties and availability of materials: Kraft paper, newspaper, cardboard, advertising posters, and fabric scraps are all concrete elements that the artist manipulates to create monumental or medium-sized works. These are composed according to surface, texture, and rhythm logics. On closer inspection, they evoke in turn the works of Arte Povera, Supports/Surfaces, Nouveau Réalisme, and other avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, with which the artist shares procedures, materials, and spirit.

An artist drawn to the question of the human subject and the representation of the body, he is also one who opposes it. Respectful of the foundational prohibition on representation in Arab-Muslim visual culture, he is simultaneously its critic. One thing is certain: Ben Saad creates independently of trends, cultural demand, and the requirements of tradition, modernity, or postmodernity. Beneath a sober, direct, and almost childlike exterior, many elements infuse his work: the desire to paint as inspiration strikes, the ability to rise above norms, an assumed and claimed creative pleasure, and a tension towards a universal discourse – an artist to highlight and celebrate, whose creative experience is worth pausing for, regardless of artistic preference, for or against.