Souad Bennani Smires, born in Casablanca in 1970, is an artist whose unique journey reflects a profound inner drive.
Trained at Art’Com, she began her career in the advertising industry before decisively turning to figurative painting.
Her first exhibitions in Morocco revealed an already pronounced artistic sensibility.
Driven by a quest for authenticity, she undertook training in psychotherapy—an experience that fundamentally redirected her practice toward a surreal, dreamlike imagination where intuition and symbolism converge.
Her work is distinguished by its formal richness: meticulous technique, deliberate surface saturation, and a constant tension between light and material. On the threshold of abstraction, she unfolds an organic, vibrant universe in which delicacy and intensity intertwine.
Each of her compositions stands as an inner journey, conveyed through remarkable visual coherence and precision of gesture.
“Imagination is the eye of the soul,” the thinker Joseph Joubert declares. To which, as a poet, Baudelaire adds, “Imagination is the queen of truth.”
From these two statements, the work of artist Souad Bennani‑Smires offers a perfect synthesis. Moving from the figurative line of her early days to this flamboyant plunge into dreamlike vision, she transcends the mere appearance of things to reveal the vastness of the living, which she transfigures with extraordinary finesse in its infinite complexity and variety of forms.
In everything that lives, the artist captures what resonates. Self‑taught, she has, since childhood, made the Bic pen her instrument of choice—a tool she has expertly tamed, allowing her to render effects of transparency and define relief through the play of shadows with incomparable skill. On this journey from one work to the next, at the heart of the universe’s vibrant matter, she explores its potential and infinite metamorphoses: horizons multiplied in an interlacing of forms that endlessly self‑generate. Organic, the cosmos is in perpetual motion—oscillating arabesques or elastic stretches conveying the fierce expressiveness of life’s impulse. Everything becomes birth, epiphany, and apparition in an open field of visions, where the details of a microscopic world connect to form the sovereign architecture of the entire universe across its various strata.
“To reveal”—never has that expression been more fitting.
This world speaks a language of images built on a magical alphabet, a universal vocabulary, and a fertile grammar freely organized around the ceaseless projection of lines, the hypnotic undulation of circles, and an obsessive accumulation of tiny, foamy, airy polystyrene bubbles. Yet, occasionally, checkered patterns also appear in this levitating universe, embodying the very concrete grounding of an anchor. A profusion of frenetic images merges in alchemical unions through which sky and earth—and all the elements—are overturned, energies whirling as so many transfigured forms of plant, animal, or purely symbolic realities.
Nature alone stands as this vast intuitive substrate of sensitive reinterpretations, filling space to the point of saturation. Souad Bennani‑Smires thus opens wide the womb of creation to exalt, without limits, the prodigious power of life. This effusion of sap, dream, and fantasy invites us to perpetually shift our gaze—liberating ourselves from the world as we see it and fully embracing the inner realm of sensations and perceptions that flow through us and define us as living beings.
In this liminal space, Souad Bennani‑Smires’s paintings serve as bridges of meaning, constantly reminding us of the importance of transforming mere sight into true vision.
Against the logic of closure and retreat, of violence and predation, of the constriction and homogenization of thought, the artist champions the emancipatory, transgressive power of imagination—one that can perceive the invisible, whether present or yet to come.
She celebrates a reconnection to the body’s organic sensations. She affirms the supreme power of an intense desire for beauty, which the soul both feeds upon and aspires to.
In this inner voyage—where each painting brings a fresh breath—a gradual evolution takes shape. The stripped‑down dialogue of black and white, the monochromes of her early works, have progressively given way to a powerful orchestration of color, with the light of blue haunting each canvas like a guiding beacon.
The obsessive dance of the line seems, little by little, to embrace the margins of white—the gaps and voids it sculpts—unfolding a path of autonomy that would free it from the recurring motif of the circle’s feminine roundness. Powerfully inhabited by this ongoing dialogue between the symbolic forces of the feminine and the masculine, Souad Bennani‑Smires’s work transcends duality, offering—with incomparable sensitivity—her vision of a world that will remain forever anchored in its humanity so long as it continues to place unshakable faith in the wonders of childhood, the primal source of the fire of creation.
Far from any form of utopia, that world undoubtedly stands as the last bastion of possible resistance…
Lamia Berrada‑Berca
The Artist’s Works:
Artistic Odyssey
(1988–2018)