The interaction between painting and society engendered Khayachi’s work, which has permitted  traditional Tunisia to live on forever. Bringing Tunisia to life on canvas was Khayachi’s dream. He could not be a painter of landscapes, because this would have uprooted him from what he held dear. He turned his back on such aesthetics, on impressionism, which would have been irrelevant, and observed traditional Tunisia with passionate love. He exteriorised tradition, and gave his art historical legitimacy. Exalting tradition through his paintings, he made painting itself a tradition, where (in a Muslim society) it had been absent.

Khayachi was a cultivated man and a humanistic painter, cleaving to the beautiful, the true, the noble and the just. Like ancient philosophers in search of truth, he painted to attain perfection.

Tunisian painting was in fact born in this brief, fertile period extending from Hédi to Noureddine Khayachi. Money did not enter into it: his work aimed far beyond market considerations, and this reveals the nobility of his character. For him, art vehicled a cultural message of great importance. And so he linked almost his entire artistic production with a representation and a glorification of traditional Tunisian society. Painting in Tunisia being born with him and his father, he wanted to stamp it with a Tunisian identity. He used sombre colours, chiaroscuro, and played with nuances of light and shade.

Although he let himself paint and sign a few rare works of the kind, Khayachi was not satisfied with flowers, seascapes or landscapes. He had a kind of thematic fatalism, and only in his nudes did he go beyond this self-imposed constraint. But with the nudes his brushwork was clean, spontaneous, his models well-positioned, his themes fresh, his brushstrokes pure, his compositions varied, and his emotional involvement unchained – he gave birth to his feelings in the paintings. Women enabled him to free himself from his obsession with Tunisia to taste the delights of relaxation in the protective shade of the feminine world.

The light in his paintings constantly hovers between a maximum and a minimum of luminosity but Khayachi prefers obscurity to enhance the presence of light. “The Evening Gathering I” is a masterly rendering of the dialectics of light and dark, the hidden and the visible.

Though his outdoor paintings are pretty (parks, gardens, seashores, street scenes), they are actually a pale reflection of Khayachi’s power to capture the visible. He seems to be bewildered by nature, and only in his studio, working on some aspect of traditional Tunisian life, does he find his mastery again. 

In certain pictures, like “The Corniche”, “Gammarth”, and “Kobbet El Hawa”, Khayachi seems to set his face against the landscape tradition; he imagines this to be a repudiation, a renunciation of what he believes to be more real.

The few landscapes he drew in Chinese ink seem to have been denied the privilege of colour.  And certain works in Cubist style like “The Couple” and “The Rachidia” show that he was able to assimilate different painterly modes. So it was not a question of inability, but that he needed the interiors, the gloom of the traditional Tunis homes, to reconstruct that family of which he, as a motherless boy, had been deprived. This almost  obsessional depiction of traditional society is the fruit of his constant struggle between signifier and signified, object and subject. He was trying to recapture what he had lost – his childhood, his memories, his nostalgia, the Tunisia that had ceased to be.

“Dignity” seems to exalt the mendicant order in a traditional Tunisia where each has his influence and prestige. In Islam, even beggars look like lords. This old man who seems to be begging for charity radiates a remarkable spirituality.

In “Dignity”, the harmony of tones and colours gives force to the boldness of the subject treated.

“The Medina Mosque” is the only work by Khayachi which celebrates and honours an Islamic religious monument. This holy mosque, which contains the tomb of the Prophet, brought Noureddine Khayachi to bow down before this Holy Place. The serenity of the people who are at prayer, its balance of tones and its harmonious whole make of this picture a work of profound faith and belief.