Loft Art Gallery presents The Lives We Imagine, a solo exhibition by Tunisian artist Walid Ardhaoui (b. 1978, Tunisia), opening at the gallery's Casablanca space on 4 November 2026. Bringing together the artist's distinctive hyperrealistic portraiture and expressive, childlike drawings, the exhibition explores the tensions between innocence and experience, aspiration and disillusionment, offering a reflection on identity, migration and the complexities of contemporary society.
Living and working in Tunis, Ardhaoui has developed a practice centred on individuals whose lives and experiences often remain at the margins of public attention. His subjects include unemployed young people, migrants, homeless individuals and others navigating social and economic uncertainty. Through his portraits, the artist seeks to move beyond conventional representations of marginalisation, revealing the dignity, vulnerability and aspirations of those he depicts.
At the heart of Ardhaoui's practice is a dialogue between two seemingly opposing visual languages. Meticulously rendered portraits, executed with an almost photographic precision, coexist with spontaneous drawings that recall the uninhibited imagination of childhood.
Combining oil painting and acrylic, the artist creates compositions in which the weight of lived experience meets the freedom of youthful expression. This juxtaposition reflects his interest in the fragile boundary between the world as it is experienced and the world as it is imagined.
Childhood occupies a central place in Ardhaoui's work, representing a moment of freedom before the expectations and constraints of adulthood take hold. His deliberately naïve drawings challenge the conventions of academic representation, recovering a sense of spontaneity and possibility. Often unfolding across the familiar lines of school notebook paper, they also evoke the rules and structures of childhood, which the artist seeks to transcend through drawing. Inspired by children's own creations, these gestures become a means of exploring the hopes, fears and unrealised dreams of the individuals portrayed, while reclaiming a sense of imaginative freedom.
Through this interplay between realism and imagination, Ardhaoui addresses wider questions of migration, consumerism and social inequality. Yet his work resists narratives of despair, introducing colour, tenderness and humour into representations of lives marked by uncertainty. His subjects emerge not simply through the circumstances that define their present, but through the dreams and possibilities that continue to shape their identities.
