During my exhibitions, my Urban Reflections are often compared to the paintings of Edward Hopper — a remark that, for quite some time, used to surprise me. At first glance, our pictorial worlds seem far apart.

My palette is vivid and saturated with color, while Hopper’s remains restrained, sometimes almost austere. Where he explored urban architecture with geometric precision, I approach the city through the distorting prism of Parisian shop windows: fractured perspectives, fragmented images, overlapping planes, and vibrant hues transform the city into a kind of kaleidoscope.

And yet, there is something essential and universal that connects my work to his.

Hopper and the Cinema

In Hopper’s world, the city becomes a stage — at times cold, but always charged with silent intensity. One immediately thinks of Nighthawks, that iconic New York diner plunged into the night: artificial light isolates the figures, the composition has the rigor of a film frame, and the viewer feels suspended in a moment poised between stillness and narrative.

Perhaps this is where our kinship lies:  in that search for a visual dramaturgy, where painting becomes a screen, and urban solitude is expressed as much through light as through space.

Contemporary Solitude

Hopper often placed his figures in spaces too vast for them, as if engulfed by an indifferent architecture. They are present, yet unreachable — frozen in a bubble of silence.

In my Urban Reflections, solitude takes another form:  that of passersby fragmented, of ghostly faces and silhouettes fractured by the refraction of light. The urban space is dense, saturated with signs, yet each figure remains alone, confronted by their own image.

Gauguin and the Power of Color

If Hopper inspires me through atmosphere, Paul Gauguin teaches me the expressive force of color. His bold, intense harmonies transfigure reality, giving it an inner, almost spiritual dimension.

In my paintings, I strive to preserve this idea : that color is not merely there to fill form, but to speak — to carry emotion, to open a sensory space where the viewer can enter and feel.

Delaunay and the Vibration of Light

At the opposite end of Hopper’s austerity, Robert Delaunay offered me another inheritance : that of rhythm, of a painting in motion, where color becomes light and energy. His circles, contrasts, and chromatic pulses give the impression that the canvas breathes.

In my Urban Reflections, the shop windows play a similar role: they fragment space, refract light, make color vibrate.

They turn the city into a living composition, almost musical.

Between Silence and Radiance

From Hopper, I have retained the visual dramaturgy and the evocation of contemporary solitude.

From Gauguin, I have learned to let color take the leading role — to let it become its own language.

From Delaunay, I have inherited a love of rhythmic color, capable of making the surface itself come alive.

Between silence and radiance, solitude and vibration, my Urban Reflections exist within this dialogue and attempt, in my own way, to carry forward what each of them explored : light, color, and the human condition within the urban space.

The city is a theatre of light. Beneath its neon signs, its shopfronts and displays, it fragments and recomposes itself—like a mirror that never returns the image whole, but disperses it, doubles it, dresses it in echoes.

It is within this play of transparencies and opacities that my series Urban Reflections was born.

The Enigma of Shop Windows

Shop windows have always fascinated me. They open a paradoxical space: both inside and outside at once. They contain objects destined for desire, yet at the same time offer themselves as surfaces of projection.

The passer-by who lingers there does not only contemplate what is displayed: they also discover themselves, mingled with anonymous silhouettes, façades, and the murmur of the city.

Exploring the Fragile Boundary

To paint shop windows is to explore this fragile boundary. It is not merely to represent the city, but to give form to that ceaseless dialogue between what is revealed and what is reflected, between what attracts and what escapes.

An Invitation to the Gaze

Each canvas is constructed like a riddle. It compels the eye to oscillate, to cross the glass, to retrace its steps. It draws the viewer into a movement, inviting them to recombine the image, to seek a meaning that no single detail can contain on its own.

Light, Glass, and Reflections

Light, glass, reflection: these are my tools. They allow me to revisit the classical genres that captivate me—portraiture, still life, and the urban landscape—and to inscribe them within a contemporary language.

A Mirror Held to the Viewer

My Urban Reflections do not speak only of the city. They speak of us. Of our projected desires, our shared solitudes, our memories etched into the gleaming surface of glass.

For in the end, every shop window is less a window than a mirror.

Art valuation

My work is officially listed and valued by :

AKOUN

I-CAC

Clic the link to access

My Urban Reflections series explores the fragmentation of reality as it manifests in the shop windows of contemporary cities. Through painting, I aim to capture those fleeting moments when the outside world - passersby, cars, buildings, street signage - merges through reflections and shifting light, with the interiors of storefronts where displayed objects appear through layered transparencies.

I never work from a single photographic reference. Each painting arises from a complex assembly of materials : multiple photographs, observational drawings, live model sessions, digital collages. This process enables me to construct a coherent and convincing image that is a reconstructed reality, fabricated from fragments that conveys the illusion of a fleeting moment spontaneously captured.

The anonymous human figures I depict - in motion or at rest - blend into a visual arrangement where spatial markers are deliberately blurred. The fragmented composition does not deliver an immediate reading; instead, it invites the viewer to reconstruct the scene and build their own interpretation.

The vivid, warm colors I employ intensify the visual presence of these urban fragments and heighten the sensory, almost cinematic, quality of these everyday moments. Through the superposition of planes, reflections, an transparencies, I seek to question how we perceive a world saturated with images and to offer a way of seeing that compels us to pause.