Noureddine Khayachi was from his earliest years deprived of the love of his mother, and this explains his enormous love for his father and his need to take from his father whatever could make up for that terrible absence of his mother. This is perhaps why he quickly learned to draw and paint, to join his father in every possible way, seeking maternal affection through his father’s love. Khayachi absorbed his father’s art completely, to communicate with his mother. This partially explains the permanent, omnipotent presence of women in his work. In his paintings, every woman, naked or clothed, dressed or undressed, is an image, rediscovered, reconstituted, of the mother he lost.

This explains his almost obsessional determination to give women the starring role in his art.

Born on 14 December 1917 in Tunis, from his earliest years Noureddine Khayachi followed in his father’s artistic footsteps. After an extremely fruitful stay in Italy in Rome, from 1958 to 1963, during which he was awarded an impressive collection of diplomas, prizes and certificates, he returned to Tunisia in 1963 full of the teachings of the great Italian masters of the Renaissance. Once back home, he turned his attention to depicting Tunisian culture in paintings that represented famous Tunisians and traditional festivals.

A rich palette expressed his noble origins and refined character. Nothing was slap-dash; his work was meticulously executed. Khayachi never went in for unfinished symphonies.

What did he paint? Koranic schools, weddings, bathers in the hammam, traditional scenes, mystic processions, official ceremonies, street games, musical gatherings – and everything painted with an incredible sense of detail.

A window onto the past

Each of his canvases is a window onto the past. A fine-looking man, jovial and frank, elegant and courteous, Noureddine Khayachi succeeded in capturing the real Tunisia in paint. By exteriorising his personal memories with such talent, he laid down the groundwork of our collective memory.

Khayachi is a witness to the truth of Tunisia, like a lighthouse whose beams guide all those who are searching for their historical roots. His unswerving commitment to his art enables his paintings to incarnate the high points of our cultural identity. With affection and indulgence he recreates traditional Tunisian society. His work expresses the truth that Tunisia has long been a meeting place for a host of civilisations and displays the extreme richness of our culture. From his easel he shows us traditional Tunisia in all its humanity and tenderness. He bears witness to a time which, though long past, has not been lost.

Noureddine Khayachi is quite obviously the outstanding painter of the many-faceted Tunisian identity. From when he was young, he was aware of the need to immortalise the humble and the prestigious, the famous and the anonymous figures of traditional Tunisian society. His classicism helped him to paint with meticulous precision.  The faithfulness of his brushwork, the minuteness of his observation, the seductiveness of his subjects and the richness of his style have made his work a yardstick for others.

Canvases of light and truth

He belonged to no artistic group, but let his personality and beliefs guide him in his study of Tunisian society. A solitary artist can fill his canvas with light and truth. The realism of his style is evident in some of his masterpieces:  “The Moneychanger”, “Rbaibiya”, “The Hammam”, “Tabbal Bacha”, “Go-carting in Our Childhood”. Unaffiliated to a group, he demonstrated his own cultural cohesiveness, his assuredness.

When a man is known to be reserved, impeccably polite and modest, it is strange to find him so radical in his art. His scepticism as to the real world is mediated by a faultless dogmatism in his paintings. Mastery of technique and strength of subject-matter give Khayachi’s paintings a range that is unchallenged. 

One could even view his paintings as historical documents, authentic and authoritative. Even the smallest details confirm his passion for his native land.

He never strayed into escapism or dreams; he saw himself as the witness to an epoch, bringing into his picture gallery every aspect of traditional Tunisian life. As Tunisians, we cannot remain indifferent to such art, which takes Tunis as its subject. Khayachi was a figurative painter who found himself and his happiness in the praising of tradition and the extolling of the Tunisian character. Living through the turmoil of a historical process which almost wiped out the Tunisian identity, Khayachi saw himself as the defender of his country’s heritage.

Classical training, romantic temperament

His way of affirming the cultural identity of his country was neither vain or ostentatious but very humble, like an artist, like Tunisia. But his work is a magnificent collection that has enriched Tunisian culture.

His classical training, his romantic temperament, and his patriotic fervour helped make him a great painter. He is now part of our cultural heritage and his work deserves to be preserved and protected. Noureddine Khayachi is one of the great figures of 20th century Tunisian culture, bridging the gap between Tunisian past and present and joining both to the Tunisia of tomorrow.  Like many other artists, he expresses in his work the permanence of a culture that has preserved the Tunisian identity from century to century, feeding on itself and on the many civilisations that the country has seen flourish.

A worthy son of Tunisia, Noureddine Khayachi has captured on canvas the extraordinary variety of identities that flourished in his native land.

And he taught his pupils at the Alaoui secondary school – so lucky to have him as their teacher – to love painting. He was a born teacher, and he spoke with devoted respect, passion and fervour of the great masters of western painting.

Noureddine Khayachi gave to this pupils a passion for shapes and colours and a love of painting. He took such pleasure in talking about Sisley, Pissarro, Corot, Titian, Renoir, Monet and Delacroix. He felt a true devotion to these western masters. When he talked to us about them, he himself was eclipsed and a strange, extraordinary light streamed from his hand and eyes as if to show us that painting is a sort of fluid charge that links hand and gaze. And a surprising sensuality would come over him when he spoke of the European masters. Such sensuality from a man so modest and so reserved only increased our admiration for him and his art lessons. He said that to be a good painter it was first necessary to know how to draw. He initiated us into the art of drawing. He hung over every pupil as a doctor haunts his patients’ bedsides. He taught, chatted, encouraged, motivated and instilled into us the principles of art without ever losing his temper. What divine patience he had! Using only the weapon of sweetness, he was able to control classes of unruly children who tired out legions of monitors. Our forms found our bearings in his lessons.

Noureddine Khayachi was a remarkable painter of portraits, whether of famous figures or modest people, and knew the best and worst of human nature, the vulnerable and the strong, that which can be understood and that which can not.

In his masterly study of the life and work of Titian, one never finds Khayachi’s person intruding. He never sounds off, ‘I think…I believe’, but abstracts himself completely, focusing exclusively on Titian. It is unusual to meet such proof of affection and respect from disciple to master.

When he returned to Tunisia, Noureddine Khayachi was totally impregnated with Italian Renaissance art. He could have gone on, spending his life painting in the manner of an Italian Renaissance artist. But, faithful to his origins, he went back to his Tunisian tradition and roots, and Tunisia gained one of its best painters. He is probably the artist who best depicted the bourgeois and popular scenes of the Tunis of former times. Leaving nothing to chance, he put Tunisia’s soul onto canvas. Each painting is like a historical document on the society of Tunisia of an era that is now past and gone. His work defies the passing of time. Traditions and customs that are no more are set down in paint; Khayachi had the wisdom to set his work in traditional Tunisia as he remembered it, keeping the past alive.

A virtuoso of the canvas

‘The dwindling of the light is a caress for the eyes when the dramatic struggle between day  and night is over.’

Noureddine Khayachi

Brushing difficulties aside, Khayachi illuminated the darkness of his work with a sparkling rainbow of colours. All great art is a subtle interplay of dark and light, of warm and cool tones, of brilliance and shadow, and Khayachi was a real virtuoso of the canvas, triumphing over complex challenges to create infinite variations on the theme of light and shadow. Rarely did he paint the great outdoors, preferring interiors to street scenes. He was above all a painter of intimate Tunis interiors. Once inside a house, he instantly shut the doors and windows, threw a sheet over the courtyard and stopped up any chink where the sunlight could enter; thus he was able to dominate the canvas and concentrate thoroughly.

When darkness takes over, Khayachi seems most in control, as though only when things escape can he possess them and only when things are shrouded in the half-light can he see them. Obviously, such complexity is the privilege of a great painter. 

He turns his canvases into theatres where light and shadow are locked in constant strife. Even in some rare street scenes, he depicts people and the city in the dusk. This constant challenge to the light is a feature of Khayachi’s world. A true creator, he rejects any outside light to illuminate the canvas with a glow that seems to come from inside the canvas itself, but also from the artist.

This permanent interplay of light and shadow creates a magical world which allows what is invisible to emerge from the darkness and light up the painting.

For Khayachi, what is vital is to use the gaze, backed up by both a painstaking study of the great western masters and a careful study of nature’s mysteries, to boldly open up the pictorial field. He does not dwell on the surface of his canvas but works within the picture to liberate light from shadow.

What is painting if not giving form to the invisible? What is painting if not giving life to what does not exist? What is painting if not setting light free from the darkness?

Every artist bears his soul on the tip of his brush. So does Khayachi, who dissolves and merges into his colours to become an element of the canvas. Where the Honfleur painters, from Boudin to Herbo, needed a tormented sky to capture the lovely light of Normandy, Khayachi plays with light and shadow to bring light out of darkness. His luminous brushstrokes sweep away the dark, and his objects, shut up in the gloom, are reflected in the gleams of light and leap into life.

Khayachi cuts down the gleam of light to a minimum and allows the gloom to invade the picture, as though to remind us that light triumphs over darkness, that day will always drive out night, and that the smallest ray of hope will overcome oceans of anguish. Like a diamond, every facet of light is precious in its rarity and necessary by its presence. The canvas lives by him and through him. That tiny glittering spark is the sole source of life, of vision…it is the sun of the work. It is the ultimate luminous touch which makes the canvas glow, brings it alive. The truth of the painting is in these tiny pinpoints of light without which beauty would not exist.

The action of light, reduced by Khayachi to its simplest form (“see The Evening Gathering”, “Karakouz”, “The Kharja”, “The Hammam”, etc.), does not the reflect a wish to stun the viewer but a clear knowledge of the powers of paint. Any real artist must know how to introduce this dialectic of light and shadow into his work.

‘The work is troublingly impressive. This is due to the strength of the colours, the correct gradation of features and the well-balanced distribution of light and shadow…Everything contributes to give the painting its mysterious power of enchantment.’

Noureddine Khayachi

Khayachi grasped this truth. Artists play games where light and dark oppose and fulfil each other, and Khayachi made of this game the law that governed his work. He became a master of chiaroscuro, daring to bypass the sun and rely on his inner light.

He discovered in the night a light more exalting than the light of day. It is not the sun that illuminates the picture but the heart of the painter. ‘O painter, you will make your shadow dark and then you will convert it into light,’ said Leonardo Da Vinci, advice which Noureddine Khayachi heeded.

His dream was to make the picture into a passionate, loving dialogue, a marvellous conversation between light and dark. From this exquisite union was born a concrete piece of art, a work where the shadow was bound by a strip of light, where light was the guardian of the dark, the guarantor of its identity and the proof of its existence.

Khayachi wrestled with the shade to extract the light that lay within it… Looking at his work, one wonders whether the light were not really just a luminous manifestation of the shadow.

Hegel said, ‘Light is formed by dark objects.’ This approach is not very unlike Khayachi’s quest. Instead of restricting painting to a simple, formal interplay of light and shadow, Khayachi transforms the dialectics into a struggle wherein the enlightened can discover a spiritual truth.  Wishing to link artistic to moral perfection, he has always painted with love and devotion. Where Goethe on his deathbed called for ‘more light’, Khayachi called for ‘less light’, not as an advocate of darkness but to bring about the conquest of the night that lies in the painting and the triumph of the day.

Diderot said somewhere that the painter whose art is merely a simplistic game of light and shade knows nothing about painting. Looking at one of Khayachi’s pictures one cannot remain insensitive to the subtle, complex interaction of light and shadow. Khayachi’s greatness as an artist is that he, more than any other Tunisian artist, was able to tackle successfully this problem of shade.

The many visits he made to European museums initiated him into the mysteries of painting. He did what Tintoretto had wished: ‘Draw like Michelangelo and colour like Titian’. Khayachi’s pictures are well structured, powerfully constructed with masterly draughtsmanship, and shine out with a range of colours of which Chardin, Monet or Pissarro would have approved.

A logical man, he realised that he could not analyse the dark by giving himself up to landscapes. He thus sacrificed the latter for the former. The bourgeois interiors of Tunis allowed him to make his dreams into hard fact, and what he sought he attained. He set up his easel in the dim apartments of the traditional families of Tunis to explore the ramifications of the dark until he discovered the light. The dark side of the beauties of Tunis offered him a twofold success: he was able, while presenting traditional Tunisia, to reconcile light with dark.

After viewing Tunisia from the prestigious heights of the rulers of the Husseinite dynasty, he came down from his pedestal to consider it through the modest dwellings of the Medina. Here he observed the microcosm of Tunisian reality in meticulous detail, offering a panorama of state and society, studying Tunisia from every angle until he had exhausted its range of images. He was sociologist and historian, story-teller and ethnologist, painting the oldest traditions and thus saving them from oblivion. The miniaturist’s art was transposed to the canvas in a true transformation of technique, the alchemist being this great artist who responded to the need of a society that was greedy for its past and crying out for its own authentic images.  

He used his remembrance of things past and his sense of colour to embody the collective memory of Tunisian culture. His academic training allowed him to outline his subject and control the dense mass of people of every kind who thronged his paintings.

So he moved on: from creating light out of darkness, he undertook another noble task – recreating the Tunisia he knew in paint. A talented draftsman, a consummate colourist, he filled his pictures with tenderness, humanity and poetry. Unknown, until then unpainted, Tunisia sprang forth from the hand of Khayachi.

Profoundly Tunisian, he found in the traditions of his country a rich vein to exploit, plus an age-old wisdom that further strengthened his humanity. He was an exceptional man, and his relentless pursuit of his art introduced painting to Tunisia, and vice versa. He did this with the same fervour as he had reconciled light and dark. This double struggle was what made Khayachi the irreplaceable painter he is.