Zakaria Ramhani was born in Tangiers in 1983.
As the son of a father renowned for his typically Moroccan and traditional paintings of scenery, portraits and still life’s, Zakaria Ramhani learned the art of painting very early in the family studio. After school and college, where he was trained in art and education, he developed a universe of isolated and expressive human figures that, placed in the foreground of compositions saturated with colours and symbolic objects but devoid of a clear narrative, compel feelings of idleness and desolation in the spectator. In 2006, Zakaria is the youngest person from his country to receive a bursary from the French government to participate in a creative residency at the Cité Internationale des arts in Paris. The denuded bodies in his next paintings became more amorphous, anonymous and acquired more poetry. The organic was even sometimes limited to isolated fragments presented in a tight framework or formally propelled within an earth-toned horizon.
Before going abroad, Ramhani expanded his artistic vision with an inclination towards art's universal nature. During his stays in the land of the other, where he came into direct contact with Western culture and international contemporary art, Ramhani developed new personal and artistic preoccupations. He claimed and proclaimed his own culture, as well as the insidious part of the Other within himself, and the renewal of his representational painting. Upon his return to his Tangiers workshop in 2007, he involved himself with great urgency in a vast project that he calls De droite à gauche. Using Arabic, sometimes juxtaposed with French and English, he superimposes letters, words and phrases to create layers of readable and non-readable matter that is shaped into faces. He thus creates sets of paintings that are presented as polyptychs or diptychs and that have quickly captivated people’s interest and generated many new avenues for his international career. Ramhani's pursuit of his resolutely expressive and spirited art has been vindicated, and it now freely extends itself into pictorial representations where the sacred, the poetic, and the political are echoes of the world's realities and absurdities.