Born in 1941 in Hammamet, Tunisia, Abderrazak Sahli graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis in 1969. The following year, he travelled to Paris, where he obtained a diploma in plastic arts from the Université Paris VIII – Vincennes in 1974 and then graduated in graphic arts from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts Paris in 1987. During his extended stay in Paris, from 1970 to 1987, Sahli fuelled his desire to break free from conventional art forms and encouraged him to find his own artistic identity. He was drawn to experimental art, due in particular to the bubbling creativity of the Lettrist movement prior to May 68, in painting and sound poetry.
Sahli`s creative work associated painting and writing from outset: doing away with semantics and eager to weave together traces and cultures, he inscribed his work with illegible scribbles inspired by both Arabic letters and Latin scripts. In line with his formal approach, he explored the potential of sounds, holding performances in which he transformed words into radically meaningless sounds.
Abderrazak Sahli enriched his art with other experiences. For instance, emulating the effort of the support / surfaces group, he put to question the materials and practise that usually define painting: he unpacked and examined the physical characteristics of easel painting and freed the canvas from its stretcher. Another stimulating influence was that of figuration libre, another French art movement with whom Sahli shared a free and even carefree approach to painting that enabled him to finish his artistic adventures in France “ with a flourish “. Sahli then returned to live in Tunisia, reuniting with his close friends Rafil El kamel and Gouider Triki, who had been hard at work over the previous decade to stimulate local painting, he then joined them in this endeavour, working on his personal project and aligning them with his aspirations and environment. He settled in Hammamet, in a modest family house but soon found a much larger studio space in Cape Bon that enabled him to continue his multifaceted production.