Bakr Addaoui

Biography

As a child, Bakr spent his time observing his father’s gestures, silently painting pictures in their house in Fes. Gifted and passionate about drawing, he began studies in applied art and met his first teacher Master Ghyati with whom he discovered the art of pictorial research and the life of an artist in his studio in Fes. There he met many artists and refined his technique by studying the basics of drawing. For two years he multiplied the sharp research, not hesitating to spend whole months on the study of a simple shade of colors, and reached a high level of mastery in traditional realistic oil painting. He won several artists’ competitions in Fes and decided to move to the capital to pursue his career. Ironically, it is at the moment when he is about to give up his dream of an artist that he discovers the young scene of Moroccan Street Art and makes a remarkable entry in the middle after only 3 walls made in the full city of Casablanca. Shortly after, he participated in the collective wall of the Jidar International Festival in Rabat.

The Art

Bakr was able to take advantage of his rich background in classical painting while freeing himself from academic constraints. Thanks to the giant formats of Street Art, he has developed a dynamic painting technique that creates a fluid and jerky movement that gives the impression that his characters literally move on the wall. When Bakr was asked what inspired his design on the dial he replied with, “My Inspiration In this work is a part of my mural art work in Morocco (Casablanca) Inspired by the historical dichotomy of shadow and light, this piece picture love and passion in a hopeless young woman’s eyes, the work took me about 2 weeks to complete and I used mixed media in completing it.” Bakr previously painted on a large wall on the side of apartments which shows a young lady holding a candle stick; and is symbolic to him as he mentioned above. Bakr called this mural the “Beauty of Shadow Comes From the Beauty of Light” (BOSCFTBOL). The extremely interesting thing about this artwork is that Bakr managed to repaint a piece of this artwork onto the a dial which is a fraction of where it was originally painted.