THE ANIMAL INSIDE ME

The Animal Inside Me is rooted in personal memory and inherited experience, reflecting the artist’s deep and lifelong connection to horses. This bond began in childhood, influenced by his father—a military man in the Cavalry—who introduced him to riding at an early age. Horses became more than animals; they embodied instinct, strength, and identity. Over time, this connection evolved into a central element of his visual language.
For his artwork, Selfati drew inspiration from porcelain horse sculptures that had been broken for a long time and had belonged to someone who had passed away. The horse symbolizes both inner feelings and family roots, representing the natural, instinctive self, shaped by memory and loss. Translated into a powerful and minimalist visual form, The Animal Inside Me reflects on the tension between control and freedom, and the emotional weight of personal history.

Ilias Selfati is a Moroccan artist from Tangier. He graduated in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts in Tetouan, Morocco, before continuing his studies at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), where he specialized in engraving and printmaking.

Selfati has developed a distinctive style that connects Moroccan traditions with contemporary art. Mastering drawing as well as painting, his minimalist creativity is nevertheless imbued with a raw and often poetic force. Using few colors and flat areas without seeking special effects, Selfati works essentially on the theme of the relationship of man to his primary nature, that of childhood and the discovery of the immediate world. His universe populated by dream horses without ears or tails feeds on his memories of a childhood spent in the region of Ahfir in northern Morocco, a landscape buried in his memory from which spring these strange images where imagination and reality mingle. His unique approach has established him as one of Morocco’s most recognized artists, with his work featured in major collections.