On the occasion of his exhibition “Painting: The Last Refuge,” Ziyad El Mansouri unveils a striking body of work in which painting—charged with intimate tensions and spectral figures—becomes a site of inner resistance. Through the distortion of line, the brilliance of textures, and the recurrence of lunar or cosmological symbols, the young artist seems to reconnect with a profoundly contemporary form of expressionism, as if it were a vital necessity in the face of the world's muffled violence.
But can we speak of expressionism without lapsing into blatant anachronism? The word, heavy with past storms, seems either too vast or too antiquated to describe El Mansouri’s painting. And yet, his restless brushwork, twisted figures, and vivid colors all seem to burn with a similar fever—one of a different age.
He paints as one bleeds. Not out of mimicry, but out of necessity. He doesn’t quote history; he inhabits it. His works echo Munch’s despair, Van Gogh’s hallucinations, the torment of Basquiat. His canvases seem to distill the visions of Miró and the nightmares of Bacon—but transposed into a different room, one both shadowed and luminous, where a young man in his Tetouan studio paints against the noise of the world.
He does not flee his era—he confronts it. Armed with pastel and oil, he captures contemporary anxiety: restless noise, endless images, mindless distraction. His pale, worn-out figures are our doubles. They wander through lunar landscapes and insomniac interiors. And sometimes, a light pierces them—a celestial glow, a shimmer of stubborn innocence, timid perhaps, or vaporous, like an unexpected grace that illuminates a path toward hope.
Timeless beings in retreat
Night reigns in his work—not as darkness, but as refuge. In Whispers of Innocence, The Omniscient, Absent Sunlight, Opening, the stars watch over the scene like wild lanterns, lost constellations watching over the silhouettes of timeless beings. Moons with human eyes, waking dreams, salvific sleep: everything invites a spiritual withdrawal. Yet these closed-eyed figures are not fleeing; they are hoping. They speak in silence, which becomes an answer. They do not yield to a world abuzz with digital vanities, frivolous distractions, and hollow exchanges, as if their primal innocence refuses to die completely. But make no mistake: this retreat is not resignation, but protest. If the painter refuses to be ensnared in the “discord of the modern world,” as Baudelaire put it, he remains a being-in-the-world: visceral, exalted, lucid, incandescent.
El Mansouri paints what the world does to a person when it drains them. His expressionism is not aesthetic but the cyclical return of an eternal truth: when words fail, painting reclaims its power. From heavy skies streaked with unknown constellations fall figures of silent cries—souls in exile. Here, suffering becomes vision, and modern chaos finds its balm. This painted world speaks to our unspoken thirst for dreams and retreat, for necessary mourning and soothing night—so that, come dawn, we may withstand the piercing assault of life.
