A key figure in Algeria’s modern art movement, Guermaz graduated from Oran’s School of Fine Arts in 1940. During the 1950s, he moved away from figuration towards abstraction, whilst staying true to an interest in capturing scenes of daily life. Guermaz emigrated to Paris in 1961, and in that decade he primarily used white monochrome as a meditative base for his paintings. Through delicate detail, his compositions reveal a mixture of interior and exterior spaces that blur the divisions between the two. In the 1970s, Guermaz gradually began to incorporate more translucent areas of colour into his paintings. He had an initial period of success in the late 1960s and 1970s, but became less prominent following the closure of the gallery that represented him in 1981. There is now a resurgence of interest in his work as an Arab modernist.