The souk is painted as an architecture of colour. Cones of spice, baskets and stalls structure the field like built volumes, while light descends, filtered, through screens and stretched awnings. El Madani is less concerned with the picturesque than with the trade itself: measure, repeated gesture, the long relationship between merchant and material. The pigments of the canvas resonate with those of the marketplace until the two are nearly indistinguishable. The work records a living heritage, still in use, without fixing it in place.
