TAHER JAOUI

Taher Jaoui is a self-taught Tunisian artist who lives and works in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

His artistic journey reflects a unique fusion of cultural, technical, and personal influences. Working predominantly at large scale, Jaoui creates paintings charged with raw, unconstrained energy. Raised in a family of mathematicians and trained as a financial engineer, he brings mathematical rigour and technical structure into his artistic practice. Concepts of organisation and calculation, drawn from his academic background, manifest in compositions where order and chaos coexist in deliberate tension.

Before becoming a visual artist, Jaoui spent several years as an actor, learning to use the body as a vehicle for emotion. This connection to gesture remains central to his practice: movement drives the work. The canvas is constantly rotated and approached from all angles, and the paintings emerge through an intense, physical process.

Jaoui employs a wide range of media – including pastels, spray paint, charcoal, oils, and acrylics – on raw canvas to build densely layered surfaces rich in texture. Through this layering, he captures the vitality and emotion invested in each piece, transforming the painting process into a source of confidence and calm. Biomorphic forms, at times suggestive of invented creatures, animate his compositions, while abstract marks evoke mathematical equations. His work integrates mathematical logic with the spontaneity of abstract expressionism, reminding us that creation can be simultaneously rigorous and free.

Influenced by traditional African art, graffiti, glitch aesthetics, abstract expressionism, and the COBRA movement, Jaoui uses motifs, familiar shapes, and even chalk-like scribbles to evoke a sense of intuitive mark-making. The canvas becomes a dynamic space where each element interacts to form a vibrant visual harmony. For Jaoui, painting is a dance with a familiar partner – an ongoing negotiation between mastery of material and surrender to instinct.

Jaoui has presented solo exhibitions worldwide, and his work is held in numerous private collections as well as in the collection of the Enter Art Foundation in Berlin, Germany.