Myriam El Haïk is a Moroccan-French visual artist, composer, and performer. The links between music and visual art take center stage in her work. Her artistic language is based on simple signs, patterns, or actions, transposing her repetitive and minimalist musical compositions into drawings, performances, videos, installations, and sculptures.
We talked to Myriam El Haïk about her new series of drawings 'Rugs, Color Fields Series' and about the two core inspirations for these works: Moroccan rugs and minimalist color field painting.
Myriam El Haïk, 'Rugs, Color Field Series', installation view, 2025, Paper Positions Berlin art fair, Ronewa Art Projects.
April Dell: Many of your drawings reference Moroccan rugs, whether it’s the bold colors, abstract designs, or textures. Tell me about your personal connection to these textiles.
Myriam El Haïk: Apart from the obvious cultural link that I have to Morocco, where I grew up and still go to work and spend time, I’m very interested in the links between drawing or painting and Moroccan textiles and textiles in general. I consider them to be my first reference to colors, textures, proportions, and forms as aesthetic compositions. I was surrounded by these objects—or art pieces—in my daily life. The houses and medinas (historic old Arab cities) in Moroccan cities were like private or open-air museums! I feel lucky to have grown up in such an environment that stimulated creativity, joy, desire, and happiness.
Textiles deeply affected my subconscious and my senses, not only the eye but also the sense of touch. In my practice, the link between music and painting comes from the association of sight and touch. Playing an instrument needs an appreciation of skin contact with the instrument – an appreciation I got partly from textiles and rugs. Indirectly, the colors and patterns in handcrafts transmit a large set of sensations and connections for me. There are different forms of synesthesia, where one sense can trigger another.
Myriam El Haïk, Rug, Color Field Series #25, 2025, Oil pastel on paper, 34 x 25 cm, 13 3/8 x 9 7/8 in.
AD: Your latest ‘Rugs’ series of oil pastel drawings also references minimalist Color Field Painting with thick, flat bands of color. What emerges from combining these contrasting inspirations of different artistic and cultural traditions?
MEH: When I discovered American Minimalism in its large fields of painting, sculpture, music, and dance, I felt at home—especially the Color Field paintings of Mark Rothko and Elsworth Kelly, or the lines of Frank Stella, Sol Lewitt, and Agnes Martin; and in music, the repetitive patterns of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. All these artists were touched at a certain moment by Moroccan rugs, probably as I was touched at a certain moment by Minimalism. Aesthetic encounters can be as intense as love stories. They blow the wind of creation and change.
Unfortunately, most traditional Moroccan rugs haven’t had the chance to be recognized by art historians as works of art. My ‘Rugs, Color Field’ series tries to repair this gap. The margins I leave around the page and the way I lay out the color bands, but also the irregularity of their ends, highlight my subject as a particular object, one offering itself to the viewer with its proportions, its light, its vibrations and its oscillations between inside and outside. If my paintings do not represent rugs in a directly figurative way, viewers can still recognize the abstract forms as a rug, and at the same time feel like they are in front of a window open to a landscape.
Myriam El Haïk, Rug, Color Field Series #24, 2025, Oil pastel on paper, 34 x 25 cm, 13 3/8 x 9 7/8 in.
AD: In what ways does your work as a musical composer and performer cross with your visual art practice?
MEH: As I mentioned earlier, the senses of sight and touch are linked. Painting or drawing is an experience of touching with the eye and looking with the skin. The French have this beautiful expression: caresser du regard(caress with your eyes). This is the case with composing music, which for me is entirely linked to playing an instrument—touching and hearing. The live wire of all these artistic fields is rhythm, which I consider the essence of the body in life and art.
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