Artist Statement – Anouar Badaoui

I create because silence is heavy. Because there are things I can’t say, but I have to show. The marks I leave on the canvas are fragments of a conversation I can’t finish, but must start. I’m not painting to give answers. I’m painting to ask questions I can’t yet form. The brush moves in search of what’s buried beneath my skin, beneath my thoughts. It pulls at the things I don’t know how to speak, the things that ache without sound. The world is too loud. It demands too much of me, and I feel the pull of everything—the contradictions, the roots, the places I’ve come from, the histories I inherit without choice. Berlin, Africa, Europe—these places aren’t separate. They’re inside me, tangled, bruised, alive. My work isn’t just an answer to that; it’s the space between it. The space between who I am and who the world thinks I should be. The colors, the lines—they don’t explain it. They reveal it. They leave the door open for you to enter, for you to meet something within yourself you weren’t expecting. I don’t paint to be seen. I paint to be felt. I don’t want to make something pretty. I want to make something that lives in the gut, that gnaws at you. The images I create are not about making sense. They’re about making space for the things we try to avoid—the discomfort of memory, of identity, of the ways we carry both our origins and our alienation. The brush is a language of unrest. The marks are not clean. They’re raw. They’re messy. And they are mine. But maybe in them, you’ll find your own. My etchings are different. They come slower, more deliberate, like the pulling of a thread. There’s a fragility in them. I can’t take back what’s etched. There’s no erasing. Only transformation, erosion, the slow process of becoming something else. The lines are sharp, jagged, but also soft. They speak of everything we lose and everything we hold onto, the parts of ourselves that stay hidden until we allow them to surface. The texture of the plate is the texture of memory, rough and smooth, broken and whole. It is about what is said and what is unsaid. I don’t care if you understand. I care if you feel. I care if something shifts in you, if the work does what it’s meant to do—remind you that we are all fractured, we are all in motion, we are all becoming. My art is not a question for you to answer. It’s a question for you to sit with. To sit inside of. To let it move you, like the soundless ache that never leaves. I make this work because I have to. And if you stand in front of it, if you let yourself feel the layers beneath the surface, then maybe it will speak to you too. Maybe, in its silence, it will give you something you weren’t expecting.