Oil portrait of Diane Painting

Contemporary figurative painter based in Paris. My work explores identity, exile, and belonging through oil painting, drawing from a personal history shaped by dual cultural heritage. I trained at CRÉAPOLE (School of Art and Design, Paris), where I received the jury’s “coup de cœur” award and I began my creative career in fashion as a Creative director and Fashion designer. After a decade in that field, I turned fully to painting, finding in oils, a timeless, expressive medium that allows me to convey my vision with clarity and depth. My paintings reflect the story of a child caught between two worlds: Algeria, my mother’s homeland, and France, my birthplace. That in-between space, neither fully here nor there, is where my visual language was born. I explore the disorientation of growing up between cultures, and the ongoing process of deconstructing and rebuilding identity. Adrift, this is the story of a child in search of a sense of direction, finding his only true feeling of belonging aboard a boat, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by other children like him, floating between two identities. My work conveys this drifting, this search for grounding. I choose oil paint for its material richness and emotional range. It allows me to capture moments of suspension; those rare instants when identity is not fixed but shifting, being shaped and reshaped.