Born in Gaza in 1966, Taysir Batniji lives and works in Paris. In his early exploration of new visual languages, he gradually moved away from painting as his primary medium, developing the multidisciplinary approach that would characterize his work over the following decades. Partly prompted by his experimentation with new formal languages, but also by his experience living in between many places from 1994 to 2006, performance, site-specific (often ephemeral) installation, video or photography for example entered his vocabulary, with the choice of medium increasingly determined by the subject matter.
From very early on, time became a central element in Batniji’s work, as he repeatedly sought to suspend it or capture fleeting moments. Returning to the more traditional medium of painting on canvas after many years, the artist began his Remnants series in 2024, stretching a split-second into seemingly abstract compositions. In fact, they are blurred, hyperrealist, almost suprematist representations of a reality that lingers, like the memory of a nightmare.
The works translate the distortions caused by poor internet connectivity into paintings. As he receives news circulating in Telegram channels, the artist captures screenshots of the accompanying images before their violent content has fully downloaded onto his phone. Through a painstakingly slow process, he renders these digital distortions on canvas. These meticulously made oil paintings have an almost monochromic dark palette, in which the contours of human figures and war-ravaged urban landscapes dissolve to form fluid compositions. Applying the paint in successive layers with increasingly fine brushes, Batniji produces subtle chromatic gradations in half-tones of blue, green, black and reds… Their absolutely perfect surfaces, executed with a technical mastery reminiscent of the Old Masters, remain silent and opaque, concealing the secret of their origins behind a veil.
By slowing time down, Batniji prolongs the moment of unknowing, and seems to place a filter between himself and the violence documented in these images. It is as though he allows himself, however provisionally, to evade an unspeakable reality, preventing it from fully unfolding. By conjuring an alternative temporality, he momentarily sidesteps the events he observes, seeking to exorcise the devastating pain they provoke. In doing so, he opens a space in which painting becomes contemplation.
Yet, behind this apparent serenity, the captions accompanying the source images relentlessly expose the harsh reality that the paintings surfaces seem to hold at bay: “A Palestinian after his house was bombed, April 27, 2024”; “A massacre in Rafah, May 26, 2024”; or “Infant girl whose arm was amputated during the bombing of her family home, April 11, 2025”.