Spanning years of artistic creation, the exhibition offers an immersive journey into the visual and poetic universe of the artist, revealing the layers of a constantly evolving visual language.
Conceived as a voyage through time, the exhibition highlights the different phases of Ben Saad’s career, shedding light on the transformations of his approach, his technical experiments, and the recurring themes that run through his body of work.
Hammadi Ben Saad – Echoes of a journey, 2025. ©Laila Farhat
Hammadi Ben Saad – Echoes of a journey, 2025. ©Laila Farhat
Where Matter Remembers
In the works of Hammadi Ben Saad, silences throb beneath
the skin of surfaces.
Gestures of shadow and light, cast beyond the frame, beyond
time.
Here, painting tells no story it becomes. It does not show; it
whispers.
The artist erases boundaries, quiets contours.
On cardboard, everything opens up, piles up, unfolds.
The monochrome is not absence it is a contained multitude, a
held breath.
Color spreads in veils without center or edge, like a breath
stretched across the vastness of the world.
Each collage is an archaeology of the moment: rolled paper,
folded… matter entangled with glue, gravity, and chance.
There is a slow tectonic movement of gesture, a patient chaos of
appearances and erasures.
Strata accumulate like resistant memories, furrows deepen,
marbling forms not to speak, but simply to exist.
Each piece is a living, irregular skin, where the visible and the
invisible intertwine in a silent dance.
It is a free abstraction, intuitive, almost instinctive, where Art
Brut flirts with lyrical momentum.
A world without hierarchy, without center only traces, tensions,
breaths.
Hammadi Ben Saad does not paint images. He opens thresholds.
He offers places where the gaze loses itself,
where matter speeaks a wordless language the language of movement,
memory, and mystery.
Rim Ben Boubaker
the artist
Hamadi Ben Saad was born in 1948 in Tunis, where he still lives and works today. A self-taught artist, he has been developing a singular body of work since the late 1960s, at the crossroads of Art Brut, contemporary art, and free experimentation.
His artistic practice began in 1966, fueled by a deep curiosity for everyday materials and an instinctive relationship with creation.
Inspired by the Medina of Tunis, the colors of the seasons, light, and the movements of nature, Hamadi Ben Saad explores the representation of the human body in his work.
Rooted in a non-academic approach, Hamadi Ben Saad stands out for his rare formal freedom, detached from mainstream movements and aesthetic norms. He draws his materials from urban life: kraft paper, newspapers, cardboard, advertising posters, worn fabrics… Elements that he transforms through painting, collage, and assemblage to compose works with rich textures, organic rhythms, and varied formats, from the monumental to the intimate. His visual universe, raw, sensual, and poetic echoes the legacies of the Supports/Surfaces movement and Nouveau Réalisme, while remaining deeply personal. He explores both figurative painting, through series of portraits and faces, and abstraction, by developing diffuse forms that emerge from his creative process.