GUEST ARTIST | Touils | 2026

Moderne Art Fair continues to showcase emerging artists at the heart of its programme. In dialogue with the major works of the 20th century that form the fair’s DNA, a new generation of artists is taking over its aisles.

Among this new generation, Moderne Art Fair is pleased to present Touils at its 2026 edition. Born in Oujda, Morocco, in 1995, the self-taught painter has forged his artistic path outside traditional routes. He moved to France at the age of eighteen, establishing his studio in Lille before continuing his practice in Dubai. Self-taught, Touils has developed a deeply personal approach to painting, in which his experience, memory and relationship to place occupy a central position. Landscape lies at the heart of his practice. His landscapes are rooted in real places, yet transform them into genuine inner maps, reconstructed through sensitivity and perception. Through his work with colour and material, the artist seeks less to reproduce a place than to convey its sensation.

This approach is notably rooted in his admiration for Claude Monet, whose work occupies a central place in his artistic practice. Like Monet, Touils places particular emphasis on light, variations in colour and the sensory perception of landscape. He similarly creates works on XXL formats, sometimes conceived as polyptychs. He also draws inspiration from the research and artistic practices of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. This connection to the great masters of modernity has led him to be regarded today as a “modern-day Impressionist”, bringing the legacy of Impressionism into dialogue with a deeply contemporary sensibility.

Indeed, Touils reinvents this legacy through a personal perspective on Moroccan culture and traditions. Rather than considering tradition as a mere vestige of the past or as a decorative element, he explores its memory, rhythms and textures. The richness of Moroccan textiles, architectural traces, and the particular relationship between nature and everyday life all become sources of inspiration, which he translates into his paintings. His work thus enters into dialogue with the fair’s programme and resonates with the exhibition at the Institut du monde arabe, this edition’s guest of honour, extending the particular attention devoted this year to Mediterranean artistic scenes and sensibilities.

Touils offers a renewed vision of landscape, in which the memory of place intertwines with imagination and personal experience.

TOUILS, Oasis of Two Suns, 2026, Oil, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 150 × 180 cm.