Vehicles of Meaning: Inside the World of Nassim Azarzar

By the time Nassim Azarzar began noticing Morocco’s long-haul trucks, he was already thinking about endings. “Just before this encounter, I made a project that maybe had been a bit of a statement,” he recalls. “The name of the show was There Is Nothing Left to See.” The work, a series of experiments using the chemical backs of Polaroid films, was a meditation on looking, on the limits of seeing, and on the exhaustion of images. “I was turning the film, not using the camera, and playing with the matter that is supposed to show the world,” he says. “Some shapes were being created through crystallisation that looked like cosmic artifacts and, at the same time, microscopic cellular things.”

Nassim Azarzar, Untitled, 2025. Image Credit Loft Art Gallery. 

When he exhibited the work at Kult in Rabat, his first solo show, it felt almost like a closing gesture. “The fact of using that title and making this statement kind of scared me,” he says. “As if it was the end of something.” 

What could be seen once there was nothing left? 

The answer to this question arrived when Azarzar sought creative refuge on the road. At the time, he was living between Tangier and Rabat, teaching in a school and travelling weekly along Morocco’s main highways. “That’s the moment when I started to notice these trucks,” he remembers. “They are the only transport that can go deeply into the villages and all parts of Morocco.” Their exteriors, layered with patterns, hand-painted ornaments, and geometric signs, fascinated him from a documentary perspective. Determined to capture their beauty, he began photographing as many as he could. For Azarzar, these decorated trucks represented both a stroke of inspiration and a continuation of vision; a way to find meaning and imagery even after declaring there was “nothing left to see.

From behind the wheel, he began photographing the backs of the trucks as he passed them on the motorway. “Sometimes I was on the highway, in the car, coming up behind a truck to take a picture before driving off again,” he recalls. “It might seem childish, but to me they resembled gravitating objects, coming together and then drifting apart.” The road became a kind of orbital field, and the trucks seemed to transform into celestial bodies, a cosmic source of inspiration. This spoke directly to Azarzar’s enduring question at the heart of his work: “What are we doing here against the universe?” he says, half-laughing at the scale of the thought.

Beyond the visual allure, the cultural complexity inscribed in these moving canvases; of migration, identity, and belonging, captivated him as well. Having grown up in France before deciding to move to Morocco, Azarzar found in these vehicles a reflection of his own sense of displacement and perpetual journeying.

Nassim Azarzar, Untitled, 2025. Image Credit Loft Art Gallery. 

Learning the Language of the Road

Engaging with the truck’s aesthetics, however, meant understanding them from within - from what could not immediately be seen in the question of what was behind the emergence of these trucks’ aesthetics.

That awareness led him to confront the danger of what he calls auto-exoticism, the risk of romanticising one’s own culture or identity for aesthetic capital. “At that moment there were a lot of photographic aesthetics emerging that were pointing at Arabic contexts,” he explains. “And I was a bit critical of that because they were all focusing on the same signs, and things.” Even artists from within these cultures, he notes, were sometimes caught in that trap. “As if you are someone from a non-white background, you are not protected from the same power dynamics,” he says. “Lots of us felt that we were legitimate to do something, but we were not questioning how we were doing it.” Azarzar’s self-awareness led him to slow down. “I had to accept that this culture was beautiful and functioning on its own,” he says. “I had to not disrupt that, but to engage in an equal, understanding dialogue.”

At first, this wasn’t easy. “I was ashamed of being an artist,” he admits. “I used to go see people in specific areas with hidden headphones, trying to record and ask questions without saying who I was.” The truckers, wary of government officials, were understandably suspicious. “It’s a deeply informal and parallel practice,” he says. “So no one would talk to me.”

That changed one day when he decided to abandon pretense. “I went straight to a man named Mehdi in Rabat and said, look, I’m an artist. Look at all the pictures I have. I’m just fond of what you do.”

That honesty opened a door and he was invited to El Msamra, “the original place where trucks are being transformed.” There, Azarzar discovered what he calls “a whole system of crafts and techniques gathered in one place.” He describes an open-air field with “thousands of trucks being transformed and recycled,” surrounded by electricians, painters, and printers “using the same software as I am as a graphic designer.”

“For me, it was like discovering a new school,” he says. “Something that would inform my practice and that I could learn from.”

A System of Signs

From that field of activity, a new visual language began to form. Azarzar started working with a recurring motif found on the back of the trucks, a stylised depiction of a road receding into perspective. “This perspective is made for the person who’s watching it from behind,” he says. “So somehow it was addressed to me.” That, he realised, was “the start of a conversation.”

Trained as a graphic designer, Azarzar approached it systematically. “I like to work with rules that I can modulate,” he explains. Using an old agenda whose pages mimicked the trucks’ rectangular format, he drew a variation each day: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday”, until he had filled the entire year. “I did like 360 drawings,” he says, holding up a small sketch-book. “This was the very first work I’d been doing.”

The repetitive process became a kind of discipline and a way of understanding without appropriating. “The fact of repeating and modulating the system would permit the emergence of things that would be in-between what I’m seeing and me,” he explains. “At some point, you have to act yourself in order to create something that shifts the attitude of doing the same.”

That act of transformation became central to his practice and initiated a movement from documentation toward abstraction. “At the beginning it was really describing reality,” he says. “But through this process of repeating, new things started to emerge that were not part of the trucks.”

From the Hypermasculine to the Tender

If the trucks embodied a kind of hypermasculine culture, Azarzar’s paintings which are geometric, fluid, and full of soft chromatic tension become something else entirely. “I feel like the painting I’m showing now is much less masculine than the truck itself,” he says. “And why I’m choosing to do that, or what I’m choosing to keep, that’s really the point of being an artist.”

Over time, his compositions shifted from grids inside grids, to vibrant rectangles layered over faded outlines. “I started to do squares within the landscape format to break the horizontal,” he says. The comic-book grid became a compositional tool, offering what he calls “the illusion of a narration.”

Yet what truly fascinated him was “the decay of the shapes.” Decay, he insists, is not destruction but transformation. “There’s a process that somehow can be seen as pejorative when you think about decay,” he says. “But for me, it’s part of the inevitable entropy of the universe that things tend to shift and transform.”

In that shift, he found something personal. “At some point, there are shapes that invade the drawing that are not really the shapes of the truck,” he explains. “They are mine, they equal the result of the truck plus me.”

Colour, too, began to take on new significance. “These trucks have colors that are quite crazy,” he says, “but for a very masculine culture, they allow themselves to do some things that are quite surprising in terms of colour choice.” Inside the trucks, drivers create domestic interiors known as salonet or “tiny living rooms” that echo the decorative traditions of Moroccan homes, typically associated with femininity. “I didn’t want to just focus on masculinity,” Azarzar says. “Maybe the paintings started to shift as something that is much about love.”

Nassim Azarzar, Untitled, 2025. Image Credit Loft Art Gallery. 

Abstraction as Generosity

Today, Azarzar’s canvases hum with rhythm being symmetrical but unpredictable, abstract yet strangely human. “What you have been seeing at 1-54 is really the result of a long decay period,” he says. “At some point it became something that is not about the truck all that much.” - even if the vehicles linger as a metaphor. “What I say about this painting now is that they are vehicles in themselves,” he explains. “They are a mirror of my own displacements.” The trucks, he notes, “invent a visual culture through their own movement.” In that, he recognises a reflection of his own migratory identity being born in France, rooted in Morocco, and working between languages, nations, and visual systems.

“They are paradoxical,” he says of the trucks. “Things exist together in one object that are not supposed to be there together.” Some trucks, for instance, are named after Mexican telenovelas like “a Mitsubishi truck called Guadalupe,” he laughs. “There are things from outside that invade these trucks, and that speaks to me because I feel that same paradox in my way of being in the world.” Azarzar links this to his state of in-betweenness which seems as much a mode of existence as an artistic muse. “People who think they are not in between things, or always moving, I think they are lying to themselves.” The abstraction in his paintings embodies this fluidity. He generously offers the viewer of his work the ability to feel open and unconstrained by the literal meaning of his images, referring to how  “Every person I talk to sees something different when they are watching the painting.” 

He’s also clear about the politics of abstraction. “It’s a way of staying out of auto-exoticism again,” he says. “I could be painting the type of painting people expect when you are labelled as an African painter or Moroccan painter.” While he admires figurative artists who reclaim the body, he’s wary of market forces that fetishize representation. “I want to believe that it’s possible for an artist that is non-white to exist in a form of abstraction,” he says. “Because for me, it’s also a way of talking about something else.”

The Symmetry of Encounter

When asked about the symmetry that appears throughout his work, Azarzar pauses. “Sometimes I’m trying to avoid that symmetry,” he admits. “But I’m never convinced about that.” Particularly as symmetry creates a relational way of constructing his work with the viewer in mind also. In other words, symmetry is Azarzar’s method of integrating the person who is seeing his painting, a way of drawing them inside the very object they are viewing. 

Even as his paintings move toward abstraction, he resists strict categorisation. “When I see this painting, it’s also figurative,” he says. “It’s also kind of a landscape painting.” The term “abstraction,” he notes, “brings a whole history of art with it,” and he prefers to keep the category open, a mode of thinking which is successful in allowing the beautiful complexities of his work to exist in their own visual modes. 

Toward Collective Space

Azarzar’s future work extends this openness into new, collaborative forms. “When I talk about the painting as a vehicle, that’s something I’m going to research for the next year,” he says. At the Jan Van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands, he plans to transform his visual language into spatial installations he likens them to  “a decor, like a set design” , these spaces will eventually host performances and collective writing workshops. Through this, he hopes to “create text and content that would become sound pieces or film,” spaces where “some type of energy would happen and gather us.” This gives his work both a poetic and political angle, abetting diasporic being and narratives to be part of a bigger statement on art creation.

An Ongoing Conversation

In the end, Azarzar’s practice, from the backs of trucks to grids of color and future performative spaces, remains an extended dialogue between worlds: between movement and stasis, masculinity and tenderness, figuration and abstraction.

His paintings, like the trucks that first inspired them, are vehicles both literally for goods, and theoreticaly for meaning. “There’s something happening here,” he said when he first saw them on the road. Years later, the same could be said of his own work: a restless, resonant conversation in perpetual motion.