Guy Hepner Gallery

Taher Jaoui Lovers in Chaos For Sale

Taher Jaoui
Taher Jaoui - Lovers in Chaos, 2026, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

Lovers in Chaos, 2026

Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

31 x 23 in 80 x 60 cm

About this work

Taher Jaoui's paintings are consistently animated by a preoccupation with relationship — between individuals, between states of being, between the desire for connection and the disruptive forces that place it under pressure. His canvases enact these dynamics through the physical language of paint: colour that meets and separates, marks that reach toward and recoil from each other, forms that emerge and dissolve in a perpetual negotiation between presence and dissolution. Lovers in Chaos (2026) is an oil and acrylic on canvas measuring 80 × 60 cm. At this scale, the work's title — invoking love and disorder in equal measure — is given particularly concentrated expression: the smaller format requires Jaoui to distil the emotional and formal content of his practice into a more condensed visual argument. Gestural marks and vivid colour areas interweave across the surface, the composition enacting the turbulence of romantic connection at its most intense — the way love, at its most consuming, is indistinguishable from the chaos it inhabits and creates. The combined use of oil and acrylic on canvas enables Jaoui to work with the full range of his painterly means within this compact format. The surface of Lovers in Chaos shows the textural variety and chromatic depth that characterise his larger works, compressed into a format that brings intimacy to the emotional address of the image. For collectors seeking an entry into Jaoui's practice at a more domestic scale, Lovers in Chaos offers an exemplary introduction — all of the artist's formal and emotional intelligence present in a work sized for close, personal engagement.

Price on Application

Edition & Provenance

Year
2026
Medium
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

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About the Paintings Series

Series Performance & Market Position

Taher Jaoui's paintings occupy an emerging position in the contemporary market, attracting collectors drawn to works that combine formal sophistication with cultural specificity. Jaoui's practice — rooted in his Franco-Tunisian heritage and shaped by engagement with both Western art history and North African visual culture — produces paintings of distinctive visual authority that sit outside the mainstream of contemporary figurative painting while engaging with many of its core concerns.

At Guy Hepner, Jaoui works have attracted collectors seeking emerging artists with clear formal vision and institutional development trajectory. His paintings are priced in the range that makes serious early acquisition strategically compelling.

Technical & Historical Context

Jaoui works primarily in oil on canvas, developing a visual language that draws on patterns, textures, and colour relationships from his cultural background while engaging formally with the history of Western painting. His compositions frequently invoke textile patterns, architectural surfaces, and the formal geometry of decorative arts traditions, rendering them through a fine art painting lens that transforms ornament into subject matter.

His practice reflects a growing critical and collector interest in artists who bring non-Western visual traditions into dialogue with contemporary painting conventions — a conversation that has increasingly moved from the margins to the centre of international art discourse.

Individual Works & Collector Preferences

Jaoui's larger-format canvases demonstrate his visual language most fully, allowing the complexity of his pattern-based compositions to develop at a scale appropriate to their ambition. Collectors frequently acquire multiple works to represent the range of his colour and compositional approaches.

Authentication & Condition Considerations

Works are authenticated through Jaoui's studio and gallery representation. Oil on canvas requires standard fine art handling and display protocols; works should be stored and hung away from direct light and humidity extremes.


Contact Guy Hepner at 177 10th Avenue, New York to discuss Taher Jaoui painting availability and acquisition strategy.

Artistic Context

Taher Jaoui's practice sits within a growing critical conversation around artists bringing North African and broader non-Western decorative and textile traditions into direct formal dialogue with the history of Western painting. His Franco-Tunisian heritage informs a visual vocabulary built from pattern, architectural surface, and colour relationships drawn from his cultural background, rendered through the technical conventions of oil painting on canvas.

This kind of cross-cultural formal synthesis has become an increasingly significant strand within contemporary painting more broadly, as institutions and collectors alike have shown growing interest in artists whose work complicates and expands the historically Western-centred canon of modern and contemporary painting.

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Lovers in Chaos

About Taher Jaoui

Taher Jaoui is a French artist of Tunisian origin, born in Tunis in 1978. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, graduating in 2007 with a background in science and finance, and worked for a time as an actor before turning fully to painting in 2013, beginning with collage work using old photographs.

Jaoui's large scale abstract paintings draw on Abstract Expressionism, graffiti, African art, and the COBRA movement, combining oil, enamel, spray paint, and charcoal into densely layered surfaces. His compositions bring together vibrant color, gestural mark making, and recurring motifs, including circles, grids, and mathematical symbols, reflecting his earlier training in science and structured thinking even as the work itself remains intuitive and unplanned. His process is physical: he rotates the canvas continuously while painting, approaching it from every angle, treating the body as an active part of the composition rather than a separate tool. He has described this way of working as closer to dance than traditional painting, letting movement and instinct guide each layer.

Jaoui's work is held in private and public collections across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States, and he has exhibited widely, including in New York, Berlin, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Seoul. He is represented by galleries internationally, including Guy Hepner in New York.

Guy Hepner works with collectors seeking Taher Jaoui's dense, gestural abstract paintings. Contact us to discuss available inventory or to inquire about upcoming releases.

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