: Morocco
Born: 1952 in Taounate.
Bouchta El Hayani was born in 1952 in Taounate, a small town in Morocco's pre-Rif region, far from the country's artistic centres. He entered painting through the applied arts, training at the École des Arts Appliqués in Casablanca in decoration and graphic arts. That training — closer to workshop than academy — left a decisive mark: drawing would never be a preparatory stage for him but the very matrix of the painting. He exhibited for the first time in 1970, aged eighteen, at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in Casablanca. He soon joined the Centre Pédagogique Régional in Rabat, where he taught for many years, later working at the National School of Architecture as well.
His career took shape in the Rabat of the 1970s and 1980s, when the Moroccan scene was consumed by a pressing question: on what terms can a painting be both modern and Moroccan? Working as an illustrator for the magazine Al Assas, he kept close company with Mohamed Kacimi, Fouad Bellamine, Miloud Labied and Hassan Slaoui. He took part in the major events of the period: the Bab Rouah National Gallery from 1976, five Moroccan painters in Milan and Brussels in 1977, the first Tunis Biennial and the Asilah Festival in 1981, the Oudayas Museum in 1982, Moroccan Cultural Week in Dakar in 1984, Cairo in 1988. In 1998, a stay at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris marked a reflective pause mid-career.
The trajectory is not linear, and that is what makes it interesting. A long period of non-figurative expressionism, where line dissolves into a densely worked surface, gives way to a phase of heightened attention to support and texture, before a frontal return to the figure from the 2000s onward. Bodies reappear standing, vertical, framed by drawing that no longer hides behind colour, in a space without setting and often without faces: presences rather than portraits. Where many painters of his generation sought legitimacy in traditional signs, El Hayani held a lonelier position, working his inheritance through displacement rather than quotation.
Fifty years of practice have earned him a singular place in the history of Moroccan painting: that of an artist who resists classification, yet whose every period remains recognisable by the quality of the line. His works are held in numerous public and private collections in Morocco and abroad, and have been the subject of several monographs. A major retrospective in Casablanca made it possible to measure the underlying coherence of a body of work whose variety of manners might otherwise suggest discontinuity. A board member of the Moroccan Association of Visual Artists, he lives and works in Rabat.