“Architecture taught me to think through structure, space, matter and light. My doctoral research taught me to look deeper at atmosphere, perception, memory, and the way we experience space. Painting gave all of that somewhere else to go. Somewhere more instinctive. More free. And little by little, it became FROM CHAOS TO LIGHT.”
Nour Aouissaoui is a Tunisian artist and architect, born in Oman and raised between Oman and Dubai. Based in Paris, she works across painting, architecture and research.
Artist Statement
My work is built in layers. I approach painting as a process of transformation, where chaos is not something to be erased, but something to move through. Each work begins intuitively, through raw gestures, fragments, tensions and accumulations of matter. I build, erase, cover and reveal, allowing the composition to evolve over weeks or sometimes months. Every layer carries the trace of a different moment, a memory, an emotion, an interruption while colour gradually emerges as a force of reconstruction.
My practice is deeply informed by my relationship with architecture. I think through painting in terms of structure, materiality, depth, rhythm and light. Yet unlike architecture, where space is constructed through precision, painting allows me to surrender control. The canvas becomes a place of negotiation between order and instinct, density and openness, destruction and reconstruction.
Light occupies a central place in this process. It does not erase what came before: It emerges through it. Earlier traces remain partially visible beneath the surface, turning the painting into a form of living memory. Ultimately, my work is about resilience and transformation — the possibility of rebuilding without denying what has been broken.
Biography
Nour Aouissaoui is a Tunisian artist and architect, born in Oman and raised between Oman and Dubai. Based in Paris, her multidisciplinary practice has been shaped by a life across different cultures, landscapes and architectural environments, informing a distinctive sensitivity to space, materiality and light.
Trained as an architect, Aouissaoui further developed her expertise in architecture and digital design through a postgraduate degree from École des Ponts ParisTech and ESTP Paris. She is currently completing a PhD in Architecture at Paris-Malaquais in Paris, where her research explores the relationship between architecture, sensory experience and poetic approaches to space.
Her artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of painting, architecture and research. Working primarily through abstraction, she constructs her paintings through successive processes of accumulation, erasure and reconstruction. Her work has been presented through exhibitions and international artistic projects in Paris and abroad. Nour Aouissaoui lives and works in Paris.