Souad Bennani Smires

Souad Bennani Smires – Sans titre, 2026

Souad Bennani Smires is a Moroccan artist based in Casablanca. Her practice focuses primarily on oil painting and is currently rooted in the field of contemporary abstraction.

Born in Casablanca in 1970, she grew up in a family environment shaped by high aesthetic standards—the fertile ground for an early artistic sensitivity and a passion for drawing, which she practiced from childhood with a remarkably singular intensity.

Her educational background is deliberately diverse: an introduction at the Ceruleum Visual Arts School in Lausanne, followed by training in graphic design at the Art’Com School in Casablanca, and a subsequent career in advertising that sharpened her eye and forged her mastery of visual language. Starting in 2010, she spent several years in France, where she attended an art studio and experimented with sculpture, expanding her understanding of form and matter.

The decisive turning point came in 2016 with a training in relational psychotherapy at the IMPR in Casablanca. This foundational experience liberated a surreal and dreamlike imagination, permanently anchoring her practice in a spontaneous, embodied, and inhabited pictorial gesture.

Her work subsequently asserted itself with great power through a prolific series using Bic pens and markers following the lockdown.

Today, Souad Bennani Smires’s artistic work—crossed by dendritic networks, alveolar structures, luminous fractures, and figural apparitions—explores the correspondences between the infinitely small and the infinitely great, bridging the microscopic and the geological.