He arrived in France from Oujda at 18, taught himself to paint and now exhibits in Paris
Born in Oujda, Touils moved to France at 18 and built his career as a painter on his own. After working in Lille and then in Dubai, the Moroccan artist is on the programme for the Moderne Art Fair, taking place in Paris from October 22 to 25.
Touils was born in 1995. When he left Morocco for France, he had not received any formal art training. He taught himself to paint and set up his studio in Lille before continuing his work in Dubai, according to the Moderne Art Fair.
Landscape became the focus of his painting. Touils starts with real places, then transforms them through colour and texture. He also works on large canvases, sometimes made up of several panels. Claude Monet is one of his inspirations, alongside Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.
From Oujda to Place de la Concorde
His career has already taken him to the United Kingdom: in 2024, he presented “True Colours”, his first major solo exhibition in the country, at Maddox Gallery in London, according to his biography published by Artsper.
In Paris, his works will be presented at the Moderne Art Fair, which will be held at Place de la Concorde from October 22 to 25. Among the paintings featured by the organiser are “Oasis of Two Suns”, painted in 2026, and “Cherry Blossom Rain on the Fushimi River”, a canvas more than four metres wide.
Touils’s landscapes also bear traces of Morocco: textiles, architecture and memories of places he has travelled through feed into a body of work he developed outside art schools, since leaving Oujda at 18.
