
Mehdi Boualli
Born in Mulhouse in 1998, my path has been shaped by a range of experiences — artistic, professional, human — and an alternative education, notably marked by the Steiner system. This unconventional journey, made up of varied rhythms, diverse gestures, and contrasting environments, naturally led me to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where I studied under François Boisrond, then Stéphane Calais.
My practice is rooted in painting, with a particular focus on projected mediums: inks, aerosols, acrylics, airbrush. These tools, both volatile and precise, have allowed me to develop a visual grammar where breath, tension, and impact meet. To paint with compressed air is quite literally to paint with the pressure of breath — a living metaphor for the dualities that run through us: brutality and grace, control and explosion.
My work is structured around one question:
How can one represent chaos without stripping it of its emotional, political, instinctive force?
I conceive my images as condensers of energy: they are traversed by contemporary violence, intimate conflicts, social tensions, and that diffuse feeling of a world off balance. I call this visual territory the "entre-chaos" — a tipping point space, where movement confronts stillness, where everything can either burst or be suspended.
I draw from dance, battles, bodies in struggle — those places where gesture erupts, interrupted by brief dead times, floating moments where one scans the ruins of the previous blow to anticipate the next.
Within this mechanism of tension, I try to compose organic and unstable landscapes, where spontaneity becomes structure.
My influences enter into dialogue with those of Goya, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Pierre Alechinsky, Georges Mathieu, and Trevor Shimizu — for their way of inscribing anguish, poetry, or dissonance into the very material of painting. Like them, I believe in a painting that does not decorate, but exposes. That does not resolve, but translates.
My works do not seek answers.
They seek forms of appeasement.
Visual breaths, gestures as attempts.
Narratives without heroes, yet driven by the desire for balance — even if fragile, even if fleeting.
My painting is both intimate and collective.
It is born from personal obsessions, but opens onto what we share:
an unstable era, an uncertain beauty, and this urgent need to rebuild — image by image — a language of the living.