Arilès de Tizi: An Artist of Disruption

"Tigritude", 2025, Oil on canvas, 4'11" x 4'11"

By VICTOR SLEDGE October 20th, 2025

Sometimes the cost of representation requires disruption. To traverse countries you weren’t born in, conquer spaces you weren’t welcome in, or amplify your art in a world that wants to keep you quiet, is to create interruptions for the status quo we’ve all been treading for centuries. And, at times, the deficits we let thrive in our society become so ubiquitous that they feel immovable. 

But then you come across an artist like Arilès de Tizi and realize the issue is not that things are immovable. It’s that we’ve chosen not to move them. 

De Tizi’s own early life started with a disruption all too familiar right now. Born in Algeria, when the Franco-Algerian artist first arrived in France as a child, he wasn’t met with open arms.

“We came to France during the Algerian Civil War as refugees. They put us in an institution and separated families,” he remembers. 

As a child, that experience put De Tizi on the fringes of the society he’d just stepped into. Even when he was able to leave those facilities, a simple look around made it clear to De Tizi that he wasn’t a part of the vision France had for its own people.

“I grew up in deep poverty. For a child, imagining a future of success felt almost like fiction. The role models I saw in France, in the media, in films, or on television, didn’t look like me. I was reduced to being a spectator of a dream I could never access. Then, when I discovered rap videos on MTV, I saw an opening. Those rappers didn’t speak our language, but they looked like us. They were beautiful, proud, driven by a force of defiance. They made the American dream feel tangible, as if it could finally belong to us too,” he explains. 

But the American media he took in offered him something else. De Tizi was able to pick up on messages in American media that simply weren’t available to him in France. More specifically, American media allowed him to see people who looked like him in positions of success, floating to the top of society versus being sunk to the bottom, as things felt in France.

"Riding Rocinante", 2025, Oil on canvas, 7'3" x 5'11"

As an artist taking in more Black American images, he quickly became attracted to Hip Hop culture. 

“We used to rap, breakdance, and do graffiti. We embraced Hip-Hop not just as music or style, but as a culture, and we made it our own,” he says.

The figures he saw in those spaces became a way to see himself in spaces France didn’t allow him to breach.

“Why did I feel so connected to Jay-Z at 12 years old? My work is about confronting that question, questioning how cultural, racial and geographic borders shape our imagination and our identities. It is about transforming what once felt unreachable into a space we can finally inhabit.” 

Although those Hip Hop figures may have given him the example, the element of graffiti in Hip Hop culture gave him the language. Graffiti created an avenue for him to express himself and rebel against a place that excluded him since his arrival. And the art form showed him he wasn’t alone.

“It was a bunch of kids being mad. There was an aesthetic of violence,” he explains. “Graffiti was a way to disrupt a society that you weren't invited to take part in. That was the only way to make yourself visible.”

As De Tizi continued to explore this new and boisterous art form, he eventually grew into different forms of visual art more professionally, even landing himself in America at one point, doing work in the same culture that impacted him so much growing up. 

His work in the art space, along with the other business ventures he took up finally put him in spaces where he could let his artistic and entrepreneurial skills flourish, and it became clear that the work he wanted to do in this world was so much bigger than what the world told him he could be.

"Low", 2020, Oil on canvas, 6'5" × 6'5"

Doing the work of creating your own representation in the rooms you inhabit also takes a clear and free imagination. It takes an artist who is able to abandon how they’ve been told to see their community, envision something more expansive, and bring it to life for others to see.

It became clear to De Tizi early on that he’d have to be that type of artist if he wanted to see his work or artists like him in certain spaces.

De Tizi’s work can oftentimes feel like a dreamscape. His paintings often use collaging and surrealist juxtapositions of form and tone to create pieces that leave you no choice but to sit and contemplate the subjects you see. 

Even as an artist of his stature, De Tizi remembers countless times when he felt pigeonholed or unwelcome altogether as an artist in often white-dominated spaces. So he doesn’t just imagine people of color from across the world in these otherworldly scenes. He releases societal limitations in his work so that we can start to challenge what we see in our everyday lives.

Because, for De Tizi, to not do that work is to leave room for a deep erasure of other groups in art history.

“Where are my people in the art world? Don’t we create? We have carried memory, beauty and resistance for millennia, yet history has often chosen to silence our voices. My art is a way of making them visible again,” says De Tizi.

Even past the actual art in these spaces, sometimes just existing as he does in the art world can be isolating. 

De Tizi recounts his performance Le Grand Remplacement at the Grand Palais in Paris during the FIAC 2014. For the piece, he decided to bring with him thirty men from his neighborhood to visit one of the most prestigious art events. Their very presence, as a group of racialized young men, triggered suspicion. While tourists entered freely without a question, De Tizi and his group were blocked for two and a half hours before finally being allowed in, on the humiliating condition that they leave their IDs at the entrance. Once inside, the humiliation continued as security followed them closely, explaining they had orders to make sure nothing was stolen. That experience exposed how identity alone could disrupt the rules of access, and it taught De Tizi about the inherent weight carried by his art.

Sometimes that weight means forcing people’s imagination by placing art in unlikely places. He recalls his series Mater, Queens of France, which represented migrant women as Madonnas, exhibited inside the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the burial place of France’s queens and kings. Among the works, one portrait was placed directly before the tomb of Marie Antoinette.

The installation caused much controversy, but the audience’s struggle to accept the work when it’s put in conversation with one of the world’s most infamous leaders is exactly the conflict his work means to interrogate. 

"I don’t see art as something nonpolitical,” he says. 

"La Vaca", 2025, Oil on canvas, 4'11" x 5'11"

To De Tizi, every space he enters and every piece of art he offers the world carries the reputation of the groups that have been marginalized from the art world. Even his work with celebrities or historical figures is still an opportunity for De Tizi and his audience to grapple with identity.

“I place that within a larger vision that ties everything back to the question of identity, how it is fractured by history, reshaped through migration, and reimagined through art.” he says.

When you work around identity as someone whose identity has always been questioned and diminished, then your work is always larger than you. It stands as an example of what that identity can be when it’s not held back by the world it’s situated in. And, yes, that is more pronounced in the face of a historical royal figure. But what the work has to say is just as potent in an ancient crypt as it is in an art gallery where it stands as the only piece by a racialized artist.

The point of his work is to clear the glass and show the world what beauty can be found in the art once you break out of the cloud of what you’ve been taught about people who don’t look like you.

“Today, my intention is to create beauty. Back then, with graffiti, it was destruction, a way to tear into a system that pushed me aside. What once was an act of breaking has become an act of building, turning rupture into creation.”

And it’s for good reason, because to De Tizi, art is what the world will have to remember us by. What he creates now will be used by the generations that follow him to understand who he is, what identities he carries and how the world reacts to their existence. 

Growing up as an artist with Algerian roots who’s seen art from the continent be repeatedly and dismissively genericized and bastardized, De Tizi may not have had the power or influence to change that narrative on a wide scale. But he and anyone who’s laid eyes on his work knows that those times have changed.

“If art is the only thing that will survive us, then it carries an enduring responsibility. My work is about answering that responsibility, leaving a mark within art history that speaks of displacement, memory and identity, a mark that ensures our presence can no longer be erased,” he says.

And through his work, De Tizi has made more than his mark. He’s created a blueprint for others to do the same. 

To learn more about de Tizi, you can visit his website here, and follow him on Instagram @ariles___