Nadia Chellaoui is a native of Rabat and lives in Casablanca. Although she studied Mathematics, it was art that caught her for good. The world of numbers and algorithms have been of vital importance in her research and pictorial vision.

Self-taught, she exhibited for the first time at the National Library of Rabat in 2014. In a short time she has become an essential piece of the Moroccan art scene. Multidisciplinary artist, painter, stylist, fashion accessories designer, she exercises her art in search of the purest and most meaningful emotions. From academic bases to creative inspiration, she joyfully navigates through shapes and colors towards a certain expressionism where the woman is her central subject.

Appointed Ambassador of Arts and Culture by the Académie Divine Paris, she has launched numerous projects incorporating other artists to export Moroccan arts abroad. Nadia Chellaoui is constantly innovating and never settles for one technique and one way of doing things.

Her painting carries the responsibility of capturing elements of the real world, which are nourished by dreams and self-improvement, in an impulse towards the unknown. Her aim is to give the dream a place of choice that dispenses with all interpretation and focuses on the direct relationship between the one who sees and what is given to see.

In Nadia Chellaoui’s work we find an obsession for faces, for looks, for closed or half-open eyes, for full mouths, for lips thirsty of desire or simply pouting, sad, in pain or asleep. The painter’s gaze goes beyond, towards distant and unknown regions for all of us, and especially for the painter herself, who knows that the more she immerses herself in herself, the more the spaces grow, the more the light finally dawns, as always happens after a dark night.

Inspiration:

In view of the dress I had to paint, my inspiration was articulated, first of all, around women, female faces, feminine expression and, above all, freedom. Yes, the freedom of gesture, the freedom to express, outside any conceptual framework. Women give life and I paint life and live painting in all its expressions.

In addition, the whiteness of the piece expresses the purity of the human being, and in a very special way that of the woman. That’s why I advance in stages, because any color will give another aspect of whiteness… Like a mask that transcribes an image different from that of the face that wears it.

As I advance in the features, in the expressions, an exercise of stripping comes into action. The shell frays, crumbles and the mask falls, but still does not show the absolute truth of a face.