Leïla Ayari

The Person

Leïla Ayari is fifty-five years old. She lives and works in Sidi Bou Said, a village on a cliff above the Gulf of Tunis, where the houses are white and the doors are painted a blue so specific the locals call it bleu de Sidi Bou Said. She paints light. Not objects lit by light — light itself, as subject, as material, as the thing the painting is about. Her paintings are small — rarely larger than 60 by 60 centimeters — made on sanded birch panels with layers of oil paint so thin they're almost transparent, finished with passages of 23-karat gold leaf that she tamps into the surface so the gold isn't on the painting but in it, embedded, catching light from below.

Her name means night. She paints light. She enjoys the contradiction but didn't plan it — she chose the medium because she grew up in a house where the afternoon sun came through a mashrabiya screen and made the wall into a painting every day at four o'clock, and she spent her childhood trying to keep that wall.

Biography

Leïla was born in Tunis in 1971, the second daughter of a mathematics professor and a pharmacist. The family was secular, educated, middle-class. Her father, Rachid, loved geometry the way some people love music — structurally, emotionally, as a form of beauty. He drew tessellations at the kitchen table for pleasure. Leïla watched. She didn't learn to see geometry as decoration. She learned to see it as light's architecture — the way a pattern creates and destroys illumination, the way a grid catches or releases radiance depending on its intervals.

She studied fine art at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Tunis from 1989 to 1994. The program was French-inflected — academic drawing, oil technique, art history weighted toward Paris. She was competent but restless. The landscapes she painted in school were good. She could render the olive groves outside Tunis, the Roman ruins at Carthage, the hard Tunisian light with accuracy. But accuracy wasn't the problem. The problem was that the light in her paintings was always a property of the objects — the way the sun hit a column, the shadow under a tree. She wanted to paint the light without the column. The sun without the tree. The radiance itself.

In 1996, she traveled to Istanbul on a small grant and saw the Byzantine mosaics at Chora Church. The gold tesserae in those mosaics changed her practice. Not because they were beautiful — though they were — but because she understood, standing in that dim nave with the gold flickering above her, that the Byzantine mosaicists were not depicting light. They were producing it. The gold ground wasn't a background. It was a light source. The figures in the mosaics were lit from behind by actual gold catching actual photons from the actual candles. The painting was doing the thing, not representing the thing.

She spent two months in Istanbul, then traveled to Ravenna to see the mosaics at San Vitale and Galla Placidia. In Galla Placidia — that tiny mausoleum the color of a bruise on the outside and a universe on the inside — she sat on the stone floor for an hour and watched the gold shift as the sun moved. She took no photographs. She wrote in her notebook: "The gold doesn't reflect light. It participates in light. I want to make a surface that participates."

She returned to Tunisia and spent the next three years failing. She worked with actual mosaic tesserae — too slow, too literal. She tried gold paint — too flat, too dead, no participation. She tried gold powder mixed into oil medium — better, but cloudy, the gold suspended rather than active. In 1999, she began working with gold leaf applied to partially cured oil paint on wood panels. The wood was important — it doesn't flex like canvas, so the gold doesn't crack. The partial cure was important — the leaf bonds to the tacky oil surface and becomes part of the paint film rather than sitting on top. She burnishes some areas with an agate stone until the gold is mirror-smooth, and leaves other areas matte, unburnished, so the same sheet of gold produces two kinds of light in the same painting.

The breakthrough — though she dislikes the word, because it implies a single moment where what actually happened was three years of small adjustments — came when she stopped trying to paint recognizable light sources. No sun, no candle, no lamp. Just: light in space. A concentration of warmth in a dark field. Particles of gold gathering toward a center. The viewer doesn't ask "what is that light?" The viewer asks "where is that light coming from?" — which is, she says, the only interesting question about light.

She has shown in Tunis, Paris, Beirut, and Dubai. Her audience is small but devoted. A gallerist in Paris once told her the paintings were too quiet for the market. She said, "Light is quiet. If you want noise, buy a Basquiat."

She has never married. She had a long relationship with a filmmaker, Karim, through most of her thirties. It ended when he moved to Montreal for work. She did not go. "The light is wrong in Montreal. I know that sounds like an excuse. It's not. The light is wrong."

Her mother died in 2018. Leïla painted a series of seven panels in the months after — the darkest work she's made, almost entirely deep amber and brown-black, with the gold reduced to a single point in each painting, barely visible, like a star seen through heavy atmosphere. She calls the series Baqiya, which means "remaining" in Arabic. What remains. What persists after the source is gone. The afterimage.

The Work

Leïla works on birch plywood panels that she prepares herself. She sands the surface with 400-grit paper until it's smooth enough to receive thin oil layers without the grain showing through. She applies a ground of lead white mixed with a small amount of raw umber — warm, not cool, so the underlayer radiates rather than recedes.

Her oil paints are mixed with stand oil, which is linseed oil that has been heat-polymerized until it's thick and honey-colored. Stand oil dries slowly and levels perfectly — no brushstrokes, no texture from the application. She wants the surface to be about light, not about gesture. The brush should be invisible. She applies eight to fifteen layers of oil, each one a slightly different value and temperature, each one dried for two to five days before the next. A single painting takes six to twelve weeks.

The palette is narrow. Her darks are mixed from raw umber, transparent red oxide, and ivory black — never a pure black, always a dark with a warm undertone, what she calls "inhabited darkness." Her mid-tones are built from yellow ochre, raw sienna, and Naples yellow. Her lights are lead white warmed with cadmium yellow light. The warmest passages are transparent layers of Indian yellow over gold leaf — the yellow oil over the metal produces a glow that has no equivalent in paint alone.

The gold leaf is 23-karat, which is slightly warmer and softer than 24-karat. She buys it from a supplier in Florence — Giusto Manetti, the same company that supplies gold for restoration work on Renaissance altarpieces. She cuts it with a gilder's knife on a suede cushion. She applies it to areas of the painting where the oil is tacky but not wet — a window of about four hours, depending on temperature and humidity. She presses it down with cotton, then burnishes selected areas with a small agate burnisher, an egg-shaped stone mounted on a wooden handle. Burnished gold is a mirror — it reflects the viewer, the room, the shifting light. Unburnished gold is matte — it absorbs and scatters. The contrast between the two is the primary visual event in her paintings.

She works in natural light only. Never artificial light. "Artificial light lies. It stays the same. Natural light is honest — it tells you what time it is, what season, what the weather is doing. My paintings need honest light or they go dead."

Her studio has a north-facing window — unusual in North Africa, where most studios face south for maximum light. She wants the cooler, more even north light because it lets the gold in the paintings provide the warmth. If the studio light is warm, the gold goes invisible. If the studio light is cool, the gold announces itself.

Finished paintings are not varnished. Varnish would equalize the surface — make the matte gold glossy, flatten the difference between oil and metal. The surface must remain differentiated: oil absorbs, gold reflects, each material doing its own work with whatever light enters the room.

The Place

Sidi Bou Said is twelve kilometers northeast of central Tunis, perched on a cliff above the sea. Population about six thousand. It has been an artists' colony since Paul Klee and August Macke visited in 1914 and came back with watercolors that changed the trajectory of European modernism. Klee wrote in his diary: "Color possesses me. I don't need to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it." Leïla finds this entry irritating and charming in equal measure. "He came for two weeks and was possessed. I've been here my whole life. Possession is not the word. Cohabitation."

The village is tourist-heavy in summer — day-trippers from Tunis coming to photograph the blue doors and the bougainvillea. Leïla avoids the main street from June to September. She works early, walks late. In winter the village empties and becomes itself again — quiet, windy, the Mediterranean grey-green and restless below the cliff.

Her studio is on the ground floor of a house she inherited from her mother, on a narrow street behind the mosque. The walls are thick — old construction, stone and plaster, cool in summer. The floor is tiled in zellige — hand-cut geometric tiles in green and white, original to the house, laid in the 1920s. One tile near the doorway is cracked and she has never replaced it. "It's the only tile that looks like it's been walked on. The rest look like a photograph. That one looks like a floor."

The studio smells of linseed oil and the jasmine that grows in the courtyard. In June, the jasmine is so strong it competes with the oil. She keeps the courtyard door open anyway. There is a marble-topped table where she mixes paint, stained so deeply with pigment that the white marble is now a palimpsest of ochre and umber and gold flecks. A wooden rack against the east wall holds panels in various stages — bare wood at the bottom, finished paintings at the top, the progression visible like geological strata.

From the rooftop terrace — where she drinks coffee at dawn, before the tourists arrive — she can see the Gulf of Tunis, the ruins of Carthage on the headland to the south, and on clear days, the mountains of Cap Bon to the east. The light at dawn is the color of her paintings. She has said this, then corrected herself: "No. My paintings are the color of the light at dawn. The light came first."

Physical Description

Tall — about 5'9" — and thin, with the posture of someone who stands at a worktable rather than sits at a desk. Her hands are long-fingered and precise, the nails cut very short, with faint gold residue in the cuticles that doesn't wash out entirely — gold leaf is so thin it embeds in the skin. Her fingertips are slightly yellowed from handling cadmium pigments, despite the gloves she sometimes remembers to wear.

Her face is angular, with a strong nose and dark eyes that her friends describe as "evaluating" — she looks at things the way she looks at a painting in progress, with sustained, unblinking attention. Her hair is dark brown with grey at the temples, worn long and usually tied back in a low knot when she works. When she's thinking, she pulls a strand loose and twists it — an unconscious gesture that visitors to the studio learn to read as "she's about to change something."

She dresses plainly — linen trousers, cotton shirts, usually in white or undyed natural tones. Her work apron is canvas, heavy with dried oil and paint, stiff enough to stand up on its own. She has a pair of leather sandals she's worn for fifteen years. She owns one good outfit for exhibition openings — a black silk jacket she bought in Paris in 2009 — and wears it with visible reluctance.

There is a small scar on her left thumb from a gilder's knife — she was cutting gold leaf on a February morning when her hands were cold and stiff, and the knife skipped. She keeps the knife very sharp now and does not cut leaf when the temperature drops below twelve degrees. "The scar taught me that gold has conditions. You don't impose yourself on the material. You meet it where it's willing."

Visual Style Guide

For images of Leïla and her world:

Palette: Warm darks and restrained golds. The dominant tone is deep — raw umber, burnt sienna, the brown-black of inhabited darkness. Gold appears as accent, as event, not as overall color. The warmth comes from within, not from surface brightness. Secondary tones: yellow ochre, Naples yellow, transparent amber. The only cool note is the blue of Sidi Bou Said's doors and shutters — bleu de Sidi Bou Said, a specific cerulean-cobalt that appears in environmental shots only, never in the paintings themselves. White appears as the whitewashed walls of the village — chalky, matte, sun-bleached.
Light: The key distinction: natural light, always directional, always telling you the time of day. Morning light in the studio is cool and north-facing — silvery, even, revealing. The gold in the paintings provides the warmth that the studio light withholds. Late afternoon light through the courtyard door is the opposite — warm, amber, raking — and it makes the paintings glow from the surface out. Never flat, even lighting. Never flash. The light should always be doing something — entering, raking, catching, fading. The paintings themselves are light sources within the image.
Texture: Smooth and layered. The birch panels are satin-smooth. The oil surface is brushstroke-free, leveled by stand oil. The gold is the textural event — burnished areas are mirror-smooth and reflective, unburnished areas are matte and granular. Contrast this with the environment: rough plaster walls, the geometric texture of zellige tiles, the cracked leather of old sandals, the stiff canvas of the work apron. The studio is textured; the paintings are smooth. This contrast matters.
Composition: Intimate scale. The paintings are small, so images of the work should feel close — the viewer leaning in, seeing the gold catch light at the edge. Environmental shots can be wider but should frame the studio as a contained, private space. The courtyard doorway is a natural framing device — a rectangle of jasmine-filtered light. The painting on the easel should often be the brightest point in an image of the studio, reversing the normal relationship where paintings are lit by the room.
Mood: Concentration and warmth. Not mystical — Leïla is precise, technical, rational about her process. But the work itself has a quality of presence — the gold in the paintings seems to be generating light rather than reflecting it. The mood is what it feels like to be in a quiet room with something that's glowing. Attentive. Held. Still.
References: Vermeer's treatment of light on surfaces — the way light in a Vermeer is not illumination but substance. James Turrell's installations, where light becomes the material and the viewer can't locate its source. Robert Irwin's scrim pieces. The Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna — gold as participant, not decoration. Gerhard Richter's abstract paintings for the layering technique, though Leïla's surfaces are smoother and less gestural. Ori Gersht's photographs of light and landscape for the quality of radiance in a dark field.
What to avoid: Anything psychedelic or kaleidoscopic. No lens flare. No prismatic rainbow effects — the light in Leïla's world is warm-spectrum only, gold through amber through umber. No harsh artificial lighting. No images that look "spiritual" or "mystical" in a generic way — the light is physical, material, the behavior of photons on gold leaf, not a metaphor for transcendence. No visible brushstrokes in images of her paintings. No stock-photo golden hour — the warmth comes from the material, not from the time of day.

Relationship to Real Traditions

Leïla's practice draws from several real and documented traditions:

Byzantine gold-ground painting (5th–15th century): The use of gold tesserae and gold leaf in Byzantine mosaics and icons was explicitly understood as a theological technology — gold represented divine light, and the reflective surface made the icon a participant in the actual light of the church. The gold was not symbolic. It was operative. The mosaics at San Vitale in Ravenna (completed 547 CE) and the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, Istanbul (14th century mosaics and frescoes) are among the most important surviving examples. Leïla's insight — that the gold produces light rather than depicting it — is grounded in the actual function of gold in Byzantine visual theology.

The Light and Space movement (1960s–present, Southern California): Artists including James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Mary Corse, and Doug Wheeler worked with light as a primary medium — not light depicted in painting but actual light shaped, contained, and presented as the artwork itself. Turrell's Skyspaces and Roden Crater, Irwin's scrim installations, Corse's use of glass microspheres in paint to create surfaces that shift with the viewer's position. Leïla translates this concern — light as material rather than subject — from installation to painting.

Luminism (American, mid-19th century): A strand of American landscape painting characterized by attention to the effects of light in the landscape, particularly the quality of light on water and in atmosphere. Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford. Luminist paintings characteristically suppress the evidence of the brush — the surface is smooth, the technique invisible, the light appears to emanate from within the painting rather than to be painted onto it. Leïla's suppression of brushstrokes and pursuit of internal luminosity connects to this tradition.

Islamic geometric art and zellige tilework: The mathematical tessellations of Islamic art — particularly the zellige tradition of North Africa — are part of Leïla's visual environment and her father's influence. The connection is not stylistic (her paintings are not geometric) but conceptual: the idea that a mathematical structure can produce visual radiance, that precision generates beauty. The zellige floor in her studio is a daily reminder.

Gold leaf technique: The technical details of Leïla's process — the 23-karat leaf from Giusto Manetti, the suede cutting cushion, the gilder's knife, the agate burnisher, the distinction between burnished and unburnished gold — are drawn from real gilding practice as documented in Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte (c. 1390) and still practiced in icon workshops, frame-making ateliers, and fine art restoration. The partial-cure bonding technique and the use of stand oil for leveling are real studio methods.

Paul Klee's Tunisian journey (April 1914): Klee's visit to Tunisia, along with August Macke and Louis Moilliet, is one of the most documented episodes in modern art history. Klee's diary entries — especially the famous "Color possesses me" passage, written in Hammamet — record a European artist's encounter with North African light. Leïla's irritation with this narrative ("he came for two weeks and was possessed") reflects a real tension in Tunisian art discourse: the village of Sidi Bou Said was shaped by this colonial-era encounter, and local artists navigate between gratitude for the international attention and resentment of being treated as a backdrop for European epiphanies.

Key Details for Writing

The gold in Leïla's cuticles — it doesn't wash out. Her hands carry traces of the material.
The cracked zellige tile near the doorway. "It's the only tile that looks like it's been walked on."
She works in natural light only. "Artificial light lies."
North-facing studio in North Africa — counterintuitive, deliberate.
The Baqiya series after her mother's death — seven panels, almost entirely dark, gold reduced to a single point. What remains.
The distinction between burnished and unburnished gold — mirror versus matte, two kinds of light from the same material.
Stand oil for leveling — she wants the brush to be invisible. The surface is about light, not about gesture.
The scar on her left thumb from the gilder's knife. "Gold has conditions."
Her father's tessellations drawn at the kitchen table. Geometry as a form of love.
The mashrabiya screen at four o'clock — the wall becomes a painting. She spent her childhood trying to keep that wall.

Quotes (voice reference)

"The gold doesn't reflect light. It participates in light."
"I don't paint light sources. I paint the fact that light is here."
"Artificial light lies. It stays the same. Natural light is honest — it tells you what time it is."
"You don't impose yourself on the material. You meet it where it's willing."
On Klee's Tunisian visit: "He came for two weeks and was possessed. I've been here my whole life. Possession is not the word. Cohabitation."
On the market: "Light is quiet. If you want noise, buy a Basquiat."
On leaving Tunisia: "The light is wrong in Montreal. I know that sounds like an excuse. It's not. The light is wrong."
"My paintings are the color of the light at dawn. The light came first."
"Where is that light coming from? — that's the only interesting question about light."
On the Baqiya series: "What remains. After the source is gone, something remains. I wanted to paint just that — the remaining."

promptPrefix / promptSuffix

promptPrefix: "Oil painting on wood panel, luminous and intimate, Tunisian Mediterranean setting,"
promptSuffix: ", natural directional light, warm palette of deep umber and raw sienna and gold leaf and amber against inhabited darkness, smooth brushstroke-free surface, gold catching light from within the painting, the quality of Byzantine mosaics translated to contemporary painting — concentrated, quiet, radiant, present"

Extreme close-up photograph, a three-inch section of a finished painting. A passage where transparent Indian yellow oil paint has been applied over 23-karat gold leaf on birch panel. The gold visible through the yellow glaze — the two materials combining to produce a deep amber glow, light entering through the transparent oil and reflecting off the metal beneath. Adjacent to the glazed gold, a passage of unglazed burnished gold — cooler, brighter, reflective. Below both, a border of deep raw umber oil, matte and absorbing. The surface perfectly smooth, no brushstrokes visible. Directional light from the left, the glazed area glowing warmer than the bare gold. No text.