Abderrahmane El Fayed (born in Casablanca on 9 July 1957) is a Moroccan painter whose life and work have long been rooted in Tangier, the city he came to call home for love.

After earning his diploma from the Casablanca School of Fine Arts (1980–1984), El Fayed continued his artistic education at the Visual Arts School in Poitiers, France, in 1986. He settled in Tangier in the mid-1990s, where he has lived and worked ever since.

Working primarily in gouache, El Fayed has developed an oeuvre that resists categorisation. His paintings move effortlessly between styles, each series revealing a distinct visual language while remaining unmistakably his own. His creative impulse is not confined to a single surface. While canvas and paper remain familiar grounds, he works with equal ease on cardboard, wrapping paper, school notebooks, and virtually any material that invites expression. No support is too humble or unconventional to become the starting point of a work.

Naturally left-handed, he occasionally paints with his right hand, an intuitive exercise in surrendering control and discovering unexpected possibilities. With characteristic humour, he likes to say that he began painting before he was even born, “in his mother’s womb.”

For several years, El Fayed has lived and worked from a modest room in a pension in Tangier’s historic medina, where the boundaries between studio and home dissolve. Widely regarded in Tangier and its surrounding region as one of the leading contemporary artists of Northern Morocco, he has earned admiration for the originality of his visual language and the uncompromising authenticity of his practice.

He hopes to spend the rest of his life creating art and often says he wishes to die while painting.