Elias Ghazi

In Elyas Ghazi’s work, humour is not a subject among others, but a mode of engaging with the image and the world around it. This sensibility emerges in his titles, choice of subjects, and organisation of visual elements, where the familiar is subtly displaced from its habitual position, opening the image to alternative readings. Here, “play” is not merely a metaphor for the work’s content, but part of its very logic. Ghazi describes his painting process as a football field, where tools, colours, paper, and canvas become players that come together to shape the final work.

A central mechanism of this humour is incongruity: the distance between what we expect and what is presented before us. This may emerge through the encounter between title and image, between the everyday and its modes of representation, or between visual elements whose juxtaposition resists expectation. Humour therefore concerns less what is depicted than how it is seen. The image momentarily slips out of its familiar order, compelling the viewer to reconsider their relation to it.

The distance created by humour can open onto a more serious encounter with everyday experience, allowing the familiar to be seen from an unfamiliar angle. The boundary between play and seriousness thus remains fluid: an image can be simultaneously light and serious, playful and interrogative.

In this sense, humour does not provide a ready-made answer but unsettles the viewer’s expectations. It creates a pause between what we see and what we anticipated seeing, turning that distance into a space for questioning. Humour is therefore not an escape from seriousness, but an oblique route towards it—an invitation to look again, beyond the expectations we initially brought to the image.