From his childhood in Morocco to a life in Dubai, self-taught painter Touils has turned his own journey into a distinctive body of work. The Impressionist techniques he carries forward began in 1870s Paris, when painters first chased light and the fleeting impression of a moment over precise detail. That same instinct drives his technique today, with his sweeping, large-scale canvases built from layers of oil, acrylic and oil pastel. Discover how Touils’ paintings reimagine modern Impressionist art through instinct, memory and light.
Moroccan artist Touils does not need a landscape in front of him to paint it. A place might have been visited months ago, encountered through an image or imagined entirely, yet once it reaches his canvas, it can become something else altogether.
Completely self-taught, Touils arrived at his own interpretation of modern Impressionism instinctively, building up layers of paint with visible, energetic brushstrokes and letting colour depart dramatically from the world as we know it. His latest exhibition with Maddox Gallery, ‘Between Landscape and Memory’, brings memory and imagination into the equation, with landscapes from across Africa interpreted as much through feeling as observation.
So what connects Touils’ modern Impressionist art to a movement born from artists painting what they saw around them more than 150 years ago? To find out, we look back at the origins of Impressionism, consider its legacy in contemporary painting and explore how Touils is making its principles his own.
What Is Impressionism Art?
Touils, The Path Of The Stars (2026)
Impressionism emerged in France in the late 19th century, challenging an art establishment that prized highly finished paintings and precise detail. Artists including Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot left their brushstrokes visible, embraced brilliant colour and became fascinated by the changing effects of light. Their paintings sought to capture what they saw as it happened, with atmosphere and perception taking precedence over faithful representation.
The word “impression” is important here. Impressionist paintings captured the sensation of a moment, be it light dancing across water, colours shifting in the sun or figures caught briefly in motion. Forms could dissolve into a handful of brushstrokes, leaving the viewer to complete what the artist had suggested. The effect often looked spontaneous, even unfinished to contemporary eyes, but it opened up a new way of recording how the world was seen and experienced.
Modern Impressionism carries that freedom into the present day. Colour, light, atmosphere and visible mark-making remain important, but contemporary artists have a much broader artistic vocabulary at their disposal. New materials, techniques and more than a century of experimentation have expanded what modern Impressionist art can be, with personal experience playing an increasingly important role.
Impressionism’s Origin Story: Why a Group of Rejected Painters Started Over
By the 1860s, a circle of young artists in Paris was becoming increasingly frustrated with the system that determined whose work the public got to see. The annual Salon was the most important exhibition in the French art world, but entry depended on a jury appointed by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Its preference was for polished paintings, often depicting historical, religious or mythological subjects, with work that fell outside those conventions frequently rejected.
Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot were among the artists who were seeking opportunities to exhibit outside the Salon. In 1874, they joined a wider group to stage an independent exhibition at the Paris studio of Nadar, one of the best-known photographers of the period.
For the first time, they could bypass the Salon jury and present their work directly to the public, exposing audiences to paintings that challenged prevailing ideas about how a finished work should look. Critics were often scathing, seizing on the visible brushwork and seemingly unfinished surfaces as evidence that these paintings fell short of accepted artistic standards.
Changes beyond the art world helped make this new kind of painting possible. Metal paint tubes, invented in 1841, made oil paints easier to transport, allowing artists such as Monet, Renoir and Alfred Sisley to work on canvases outdoors from beginning to end. Painting en plein air brought them face to face with conditions that could change by the minute. The sun moved across the sky, reflections shifted and shadows altered, encouraging a faster, looser way of recording what they saw.
Le Bassin aux Nymphéas by Claude Monet. Photo: Courtesy of Sotheby's
It was one painting in the 1874 exhibition that inadvertently gave the movement its name. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise depicted the harbour at Le Havre through broken strokes of colour and hazy light. Critic Louis Leroy seized on its title in a mocking review, dismissing the work as an “impression” rather than a finished painting. Intended as an insult, the term was soon adopted by the artists and became synonymous with the movement.
Some of the era’s best Impressionist paintings show just how differently these artists put their new ideas into practice. Monet turned his attention to the ornamental pond and Japanese bridge in his garden at Giverny in The Water Lily Pond (1899) (1899), Renoir filled Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876) (1876) with the movement of a crowded Parisian afternoon, and Degas turned to the rehearsal room in The Dance Class (1874). Morisot found equally engaging subjects in everyday life, as in The Cradle (1872), an intimate portrait of her sister watching over her sleeping daughter.
The Impressionists held their eighth and final independent exhibition in 1886, by which point many of the artists were pursuing increasingly individual paths. Their influence, however, travelled far beyond that first generation, with Post-Impressionists including Van Gogh and Gauguin pushing colour further from natural observation, using increasingly intense palettes to express mood and emotion. The shockwaves of that revolution in painting are still being felt.
VIEW ARTIST COLLECTION AT MADDOX
Collector Insight: How the Modern Impressionist Art Technique Evolved
|
Layer by Layer: Touils' Journey to Modern Impressionism
Touils, The Path To The Hills (2026)
Touils came to painting by an unconventional route. Born Salaheddine Touil in Oujda, Morocco, in 1995, he spent his childhood between Morocco and France and had no formal art training. From the age of six, he missed school to work and help support his household, before moving to Lille aged 18. Painting became an escape from those difficult early years and, eventually, a way to create the things he felt had been missing from them. “I paint what I seek: love, positive energy and light,” he says. “I want the audience to be transported when they look at my paintings, the same way I am when I am creating them.”
Touils developed his technique through experimentation, looking to artists he admired including Van Gogh, Gauguin and above all Monet, his principal influence. He was particularly drawn to their use of colour, light and expressive brushwork, elements that would become important in his own paintings.
Using oil, acrylic and oil pastel, he builds his Impressionist landscape paintings in layers, combining gestural, highly visible marks with intense colour and the vertical white lines that have become one of his signatures. He has previously described these lines as a way of bringing volume to his canvases, and they appear in many of his works, cutting through areas of colour and adding another dimension to their surfaces.
Colour is equally fundamental to Touils’ art. “Colour, for me, is emotion itself,” he says, and his palettes frequently push far beyond what we might expect to see in nature. Turquoise, orange, violet, acid green and brilliant yellow become a means of creating light and atmosphere, as well as expressing how a place feels to him.
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST IN TOUILS: BETWEEN LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY
That intensity extends to scale. “I have too much energy to liberate,” Touils has said of his preference for large canvases, and his new works give that energy plenty of room. At 150 × 180cm, The Path to the Hills is alive with repeated marks. A brilliant yellow road stretches towards mountains rendered in equally vivid yellow and orange, flanked by green foliage and orange-red tree trunks beneath a densely worked blue sky. The Path of the Stars, at 150 × 170cm, takes his palette somewhere altogether less naturalistic, turning night into a riot of violet, crimson and electric yellow hues beneath a sky illuminated with stars and a blazing crescent moon.
The places depicted in Touils’ art have shifted as his own life has changed. His debut solo exhibition, ‘True Colours’, opened in 2024 with 21 modern Impressionist paintings inspired largely by places he longed to visit. Japan provided much of the scenery, allowing him to escape through paint to places that were otherwise out of reach. “When it’s imagined, I'm free,” he says. “I can create, I can dream, there’s simply no limit.”
Touils, The Green Shores (2026)
A few months later, Touils moved from France to Dubai. His second Maddox exhibition, 'New Collection', acted as a launchpad for the Arabic Collection, inspired by the landscapes, architecture, people and traditions of his new surroundings. White became increasingly important to his palette, his brushwork softened and deeper colours appeared as his immediate environment began to find its way onto his canvases.
Touils’ journey through Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar in June 2025 provided the initial inspiration for ‘Between Landscape and Memory’. Travelling through small villages and encountering different landscapes, wildlife, traditions and tribal communities exposed him to a wealth of new places and experiences. Back in the studio, his curiosity took him beyond the places he had witnessed in person to landscapes and cultures elsewhere in Africa.
The Touils paintings that emerged move freely between specific places and memories of the journey as a whole. The Green Shores does not depict one particular location, instead combining the colours, atmosphere and energy Touils absorbed on his travels. A brilliant turquoise river cuts through luxuriant green vegetation, with flashes of yellow, orange and pink intensifying the scene. Elsewhere, the location is explicit: Camps Bay, Cape Town takes a recognisable coastline and transforms it beneath a swirling green and orange sky. As Touils puts it: “I don't worry about whether it's realistic. I paint it the way I feel it, in my own way.”
EXPLORE AVAILABLE WORKS BY TOUILS
Touils and the Collector: Momentum Worth Getting Ahead Of
Touils, Camps Bay, Cape Town (2026)
Touils has built a strong following in a relatively short space of time. ‘Between Landscape and Memory’ will be his third exhibition with Maddox Gallery in just over two years, following ‘True Colours’ in May 2024 and ‘New Collection’ in February 2025. Recent works have achieved consistent sell-through, with collector interest growing alongside his exhibition history.
Few movements have had the lasting cultural significance of Impressionism, and Touils offers collectors an accessible contemporary route into that history. In his hands, a movement born in 19th-century France is seen through the experiences of a Moroccan artist whose life and travels have exposed him to an entirely different world.
For collectors interested in following his practice as it develops, Maddox Gallery has worked with Touils since his first solo exhibition in 2024, providing access to available works, specialist insight into his career and exclusive opportunities to meet the artist.
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST IN TOUILS’ UPCOMING EXHIBITION
| Collector Insight: ‘Between Landscape and Memory’ – A Solo Exhibition of Touils Paintings
Described as Touils’ most personal collection to date, ‘Between Landscape and Memory’ turns his attention to Africa, bringing together places encountered through travel, impressions gathered during his journey and scenes conjured from his imagination.
|
Discover Touils' Modern Impressionist Art at Maddox Gallery
‘Between Landscape and Memory’ is the latest opportunity to experience the Moroccan artist’s exuberant take on modern Impressionism through a new collection of Touils paintings inspired by landscapes and cultures across Africa.
Whether you are discovering Touils for the first time or already following his work, visit Maddox Gallery to see the new exhibition, explore available paintings and learn more about the artist and his practice.
Speak to the Maddox Gallery team to explore available works by Touils.
