Artist & Painter — Paris

Marc
Kanani

Exploring light, texture, and memory through oil and mixed media. Each painting is a quiet conversation between colour and silence.

View works →
Untitled No. 7, Oil on canvas

Featured work, 2024

Painting as a form of careful looking

Marc Kanani is a Paris-based artist whose practice centres on oil painting, exploring themes of light, impermanence, and the quiet textures of everyday life. His work moves between the figurative and the abstract, allowing form to dissolve where feeling demands it.

Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Kanani has exhibited across France, Belgium, and Italy. His paintings hang in private collections throughout Europe and the United States.

He works from a studio in Belleville, where the city's layered light continues to be his primary subject.

14+

Years of practice

38

Exhibitions held

200+

Works completed

Morning Field, Normandy

Oil on canvas — 2024 — 80 × 110 cm

Still Life with Golden Light

Oil on linen — 2023 — 60 × 80 cm

Grey Afternoon, Seine

Oil on canvas — 2023 — 90 × 120 cm

Figure in Warm Shadow

Oil on board — 2022 — 50 × 70 cm

Belleville Rooftop

Oil on canvas — 2022 — 70 × 100 cm

Interior with Afternoon Sun

Mixed media — 2021 — 65 × 85 cm

How the work
comes together

01

Looking and waiting

Every painting begins with long, unhurried observation — of a place, a quality of light, a particular hour. Sketches accumulate slowly over days or weeks before paint is mixed.

02

Laying the ground

Canvases are toned with warm or cool grounds that will breathe through subsequent layers, giving the finished work its underlying temperature. The ground is never entirely buried.

03

Building with oil

Paint is applied in thin, transparent layers — fat over lean — allowing each session to dry before the next. The process is slow and deliberate, trusting time as a collaborator.

04

Knowing when to stop

The hardest and most important decision in painting. A work is finished when nothing added would improve it — which is rarely the same as when everything intended has been done.

Contact

Let's talk about
your next piece

Available for commissions, studio visits, and exhibition enquiries.

marc@marckanani.com
Instagram LinkedIn Artsy